


WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 




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WHAT DOES HISTORY 
TEACH? 



BY 

JOHN STUART BLACKIE 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1886 






*#* The following Lectures were prepared for the Philo- 
sophical Institution of Edinburgh, and were delivered, with 
the exception of a few passages, before audiences consisting of 
Members of that Institution on the evenings of 8th and nth 
December in the present year. 

Edinburgh, December, i88j. 






THE STATE. 

"Clcnrep reXaaOkv fiiXricrTov tcov £wcov avOpuiTros ovt<o 
kgu -^(apicrBlv vo t u.ov /cat SUrjs \api(TTQV ttoli'Tuv- — 

Aristotle. / 

History, whether founded on reliable 
record, or on monuments, or on the scien- 
tific analysis of the great fossil tradition 
called language, knows nothing of the 
earliest beginnings. The seed of human 
society, like the seed of the vegetable 
growth, lies under ground in darkness, and 
its earliest processes are invisible to the 
outward eye. Speculations about the de- 
scent of the primeval man from a monkey, 
of the primeval monkey from an ascidian, 
md of the primeval ascidian from a proto- 
lastic bubble, though they may act as a 
; Dtent stimulus to the biological research 



2 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

of the hour, certainly never can form the 
starting-point of a profitable philosophy of 
history. 

As revealed in history, man is an animal, 
not onlv generically different from, but 
characteristically antagonistic to the brute. 
That which makes him a man is precisely 
that which no brute possesses, or can by 
any process of training be made to pos- 
sess. The man can no more be developed 
out of the brute than the purple heather 
out of the granite rock which it clothes. 
The relation of the one to the other is a 
relation of mere outward attachment or 
dependency — like the relation which ex- 
ists between the painter's easel and the 
picture which is painted on it. The easel 
is essential to the picture, but it did not 
make the picture, nor give even the small- 
est hint towards the making of it. So the 
monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the 
man without being in any way partici- 
pant of the divine indwelling Xoyo; which 
makes a man a man. The two are related 
only as all things are related, inasmuch as 



THE STATE. 3 

they are all shot forth from the great 
fountain-head of all vital forces, whom we 
justly call God. 

The distinctive character of man as re- 
vealed in history is threefold. Man is an 
inventive animal, and he does not invent 
from a compulsion of nature, as bees make 
cells or as swallows build nests. These 
are all prescribed operations which the 
animal must perform; but the inventive 
faculty in man is free, in such a manner 
that the course of its action cannot be 
foreseen or calculated. It revels in va- 
riety, and, above all things, shuns that uni- 
formity which is the servile provinces of 
brute activity. A man may live in a hole 
like a fox, but his proper humanity is 
shown by building a house and inventing 
a style of architecture. A man can sing 
like a bird, but — what the bird cannot do 
— he can make a harp or an organ. He 
can scrape with his nails like a terrier, but, 
as a man manifesting his proper manhood, 
he prefers to make a shovel of wood and a 
hatchet of stone or iron. The other ani- 



4 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

mals, however cunning, and often wonder- 
fully adaptable in their instincts, are mere 
machines. Man makes machines. In this 
respect he is justly entitled to look upon 
himself as the God to the lower animals, 
just as the sheriff in the counties by dele- 
gated right represents the supreme author- 
ity of the Crown. But, above all things, 
man is a progressive animal, — not merely 
progressive as the grass grows from root 
to blade and from blade to blossom to per- 
fect its individual type of vegetable life, 
but advancing from stage to stage and 
mounting from platform to platform for 
the perfectionation of the race ; nor even 
progressive as plants and fruits are im- 
proved by culture and favorable surround- 
ings, and what is called forcing, or as 
the breed of sheep and cattle is improved 
by selection. No doubt progress of this 
kind is made by man as well as by plants 
and brutes; but his most distinctive hu- 
man progress is made, not by imposition 
from without, but by projection from with- 
in. These projections from within are 



THE STATE. 5 

what in philosophical language is called 
the idea ; they proceed from the essential 
nature of mind, whose imperial function it 
is to dictate forms, as it is the servile func- 
tion of the senses to receive impressions. 
These intelligent forms, coming directly 
from the divine source of all excellence, 
and projected from within with sovereign 
authority to shape for themselves an out- 
ward embodiment, constitute what in art, 
in literature, in religion, and in social or- 
ganisms, is called the ideal ; and man may 
accordingly be defined as an animal that 
lives by the conception of ideals, and whose 
destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if 
need be, to lay down his life, for the real- 
ization of such ideals. The steps of this 
realization, often slow and painful, and al- 
ways difficult, are what we mean by human 
progress ; and it is the dominant character- 
istic of man, of which amongst the lower 
animals there is not a vestige, neither in- 
deed "could be ; for so long as they have no 
ideas, neither reason nor the outward ex- 
pression of reason in language — two things 



6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

so closely bound together that the wise 
Greeks expressed them both by one word, 
Xoyog — so long must it be ridiculous to 
think of them shaping their career ac- 
cording to an inborn type of progressive 
excellence. To do so is exclusively hu- 
man. Hence our poems, our high art, our 
churches, our legislations, our apostleships, 
our philosophies, our social arrangements 
and devices, our speculations and schemes 
of all kinds, which, though they are some- 
times foolish, and always more or less in- 
adequate, deliver the strongest possible 
proof that man is an animal who will rather 
die and embrace martyrdom than be con- 
tent to live as the brutes do, neither 
spurred with the hope of progress nor 
borne aloft on the wings of the ideal. 

Of the very earliest state of human • so- 
ciety, as we have already said, history 
teaches nothing ; but, as man is a progres- 
sive animal, and the plan of Providence 
with regard to him seems plain to let him 
shift for himself and learn to do right by 
blundering, as children learn to walk by 



THE STATE. 7 

tumbling, we may safely say that the easier, 
more obvious, and more rude forms of 
living together must have preceded the 
more difficult, the more complex, and the 
more polished. And in perfect consis- 
tency with this presumption, we find three 
social platforms rising one above the other 
in human value, duly accredited either by 
monuments, by popular tradition, or by the 
evidence of comparative philology. These 
three are — (i) The prehistoric or stone 
period, from which such a rich store of 
monuments has been set up in the Copen- 
hagen Museum, and the existence of which 
is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent 
to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every arti- 
ficer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd 
or pastoral stage, represented by Abel 
(Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from 
the easy dominance which they asserted 
over wild animals, and from fruits of the 
earth requiring no culture. (3) The agri- 
cultural stage, when cereal crops were sys- 
tematically and scientifically cultivated, 
which, of course, implied the limitation of 



8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

particular districts of ground to particular 
proprietors, and those agrarian laws which 
caused the Greek Demeter to be honored 
with the title of fccr^o^opoc, or lawgiver, — 
a step of marked and decided advance, in- 
somuch that we may justly attribute to it 
the redemption of society from the vagus 
concubiius of the earliest times, and the 
firm establishment of the family, with all its 
sanctities and all its binding power, as the 
prime social monad. To the priestess of 
this goddess accordingly, amongst the 
Greeks, was assigned the function of ush- 
ering in the newly-married pair to the pe- 
culiar duties of their new social relation. 1 

The fact that the family is the great 
social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of 
the oldest and most accredited facts in 
human tradition, so it presents to us per- 
haps the most important of all the lessons 
that history teaches — a lesson as neces- 
sary to be inculcated at the present hour 
as at the earliest stages of social advance ; 
and Aristotle certainly was never more in 

1 Plutarch conjugalia praecepta init. 



THE STATE. 9 

the right than when he emphasized this 
truth strongly in traversing Plato's fancy 
of making the state the universal family, 
to the utter absorption of all subordinated 
family monads. Here, as in one or two 
other matters, the great idealist would be 
wiser than God ; and so his philosophy, so 
far as that point was concerned, became 
only a more sublime attitude of folly. The 
importance of the family, as the divinely 
instituted social monad, depends manifestly 
on the happy combination and harmonious 
blending of authority and love which grow 
out of its constitution — two elements with 
the full development and true balance of 
which the well-being and happiness of all 
societies is intimately bound up. The fine 
moral training which the family relation 
alone can inspire we find not only at our 
own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing 
devotion of our noble Highlanders, who 
derived their inspiration from the clan sys- 
tem, of which the family love and respect 
is the binding element, 1 as contrasted with 

1 The word dan is the familiar, well-known Celtic word 
for children. 



IO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the slavish system of vassalage, the badge 
of feudalism; but in the habits and insti- 
tutions of the three great ancient peoples 
to whom modern Europe owes its higher 
civilization, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, 
specially the last, 1 the great masters of the 
difficult art of government, who, to use 
Mommsen's phrase, carried out the unity 
of the family through the virtue of pater- 
nal authority " with an inexorable consis- 
tency," the beneficial effect of which could 
not fail to display itself in social life far 
beyond the sphere from which it originally 
emanated ; for obedience to authority is 
the fundamental postulate of all possible 
societies. With the family, if not abso- 
lutely, certainly with the best and normal 
state of it, most closely connected is mo- 
nogamy; for, though instances of bigamy 
and polygamy, from Lamech downwards I 
(Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon ' 
in the Old Testament history, crop up 
here and there in the oldest times, and 

1 " Nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant 
potestatem qualem nos habemus." Itistilut. i. 9, 2. j 



THE STATE. 1 1 

even in the post-Babylonian period, with- 
out any formal mark of disapprobation, 
yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and 
Romans were guided by a sound social 
instinct when they held the practice of 
bigamy to be inconsistent with the proper 
constitution of a family. What troubles 
are apt to arise from a multiplication of 
contending wives and ambitious mothers 
the latter story of King David tells in 
more unhappy episodes than one ; and 
generally it may be laid down as one of 
the great lessons of history that polygamy, 
in every shape, is one of those acts of 
Oriental self-indulgence which may be 
sweet in the mouth but has a very strong 
^tendency to be bitter in the belly, and 
therefore ought by all means to be avoided. 
By the instinct of aggregation, which 
belongs to an essentially social animal, 
families will club together into townships 
or villages, and townships will be central- 
ized into states. Humanity without town- 
ships would degenerate into tigerhood, or 
whatever type of animal existence might 



12 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

express an essentially self-contained, soli- 
tary, and selfish creature ; townships with- 
out that sort of headship which the word 
State implies, would make society cry halt 
at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates 
which would render common action for 
any high human purpose extremely diffi- 
cult, and, in the general case, as human 
beings are, impossible. Hence the cen- 
tralization of the Attic townships at Athens. 
in the legendary traditions of the A the-, 
nians attributed to Theseus ; * hence alscp 
the lax confederation of the earliest Latiny 
states under the headship of Albalonga.<; 
and, after the humiliation of that old strong <- 
hold, the more closely cemented union olx 
those states under the hegemony of Rome.^l 
Whatever may be the evils connected with'* 

1 Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and I 
attributed to the son of y£geus the creation of their de- 5 
mocracy (Pausan. Att. iii.); but this, of course, was \ 
only the popular instinct, everywhere active, which loves ^ 
to heap all graces upon the head of a favorite hero. 

2 See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi. 
95, contrasting strongly with the original collection of au- } 
tonomous villages described by Strabo, v. 229, nark 
Ka>/.ias avTovofxeladai. 



THE STATE. 1 3 

the growth of large towns, especially when, 
as in modern times, they have been al- 
lowed to swell to enormous magnitude 
without regulation or control, it is one of 
the undoubted lessons of universal history 
that the social stimulus necessary for the 
creation of vigorous thought, no less than 
the centralized force indispensable to great 
achievement, is found only in the large 
towns. The Christians were called Chris- 
tians first at Antioch ; and, had there been 
no Rome to unify a little Latium, there 
would have been no great Roman Empire 
to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the 
North with the smooth civilization of the 
South by the force of a common law and 
a common lansfua^e. 1 

The form of government natural to such 
infant states as the expansion of the origi- 
nal social monad, the family, is a loose 

1 The influence of the great city in centralizing the vil- 
lages and making a state possible was in Greece philolog- 
ically stereotyped by the fact that for city and state the 
language had only one word, iro\is. The city was the state 
in the same sense that the head is the body, for without 
the head no living body could be. 



14 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, 
democracy, and aristocracy — the aristoc- 
racy being always the preponderating ele- 
ment. In the single family, of course, we 
have only the monarchical element in the 
father, and the democratic element in the 
children ; but, as families expand into 
townships, it could not be but that the 
heads of the families composing it, partly 
from their age and experience, partly from 
the force of individual character, should 
form a sort of natural aristocracy, while 
the less notable and less prominent mem- 
bers would form the ^og, or great body 
of the constantly increasing multitude bf 
the associated families. Below these throe 
dominant elements of the body social, the^e 
would always be found a loose company of 
dependents and onhangers — the class 
called Oyjteg in Homer (Od. iv. 644), ancli 
in the Solonian constitution — who had no\ 
civic rights any more than the serfs and/ 
vassals of our medieval feudalism. The] 
weakness of the monarchical and the 
strength of the aristocratic elements in th< 



THE STATE. 1 5 

early societies arose from the original 
equality of the heads of families, and from 
the jealousy with which they would natu- 
rally look on any functions of superiority 
exercised by any of their order naturally 
no better than themselves. The king, ac- 
cordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, 
would claim the homage which the title 
implies only for purposes of common ac- 
tion ; and even in such cases would always 
be kept in check by a povhyj, or council of 
the aristocracy, of whose will properly he 
was only the executive hand ; while the 
great mass of the people, occupied with 
the labors that belong to an agricultural 
and pastoral population, and unaccustomed 
to the large views which statesmanship and 
generalship require, would come together 
only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency. 
The element in that loose triad of social 
forces that was first formulated into a more 
distinct type, and endowed with more im- 
perative efficiency, was the kingship. The 
power of the king was increased, which of 
course implies that the power of the peo- 



l6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

pie, and specially of the aristocracy, was 
diminished. And here let it be observed 
generally that the progress of civilization 
in its natural and healthy career is the prog- 
ress of limitation and the curtailment in 
various ways of that freedom which origi- 
nally belonged to every member of the com- 
munity. The tanned savage of the baclo 
woods is the freest man in existence ; next 
to him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, 
such as may still be seen in their glory at 
St. James' fair in Kelso, whose house is at 
once his dwelling-place, his manufactory 
or place of business, and his travelling 
car; least free is the civilized citizen 
hemmed in on all sides by police-ofhxeirs, 
soldiers, sentinels, door-keepers, and game- 
keepers, and the whole fraternity o[ dig- 
nified but unpopular officials of various 
kinds whose business it is to the c;ener&il 
public to say No ! This accretion of 
strength to the king proceeded first from] 
his mere personal influence and the gen-l 
eral deference paid to him durino- the corA- 
tinuance of a prolonged and easily-exeir- 



THE STATE. I J 

cised sovereignty ; all classes, even the ar- 
istocracy, whose ambition is thus kept in 
check and their perilous enmities softened, 
feel the benefit of a wise head and a firm 
hand ; but the party specially benefited by 
the kingship is the demos ; for this body, 
from its position peculiarly liable to be 
trampled on by an insolent aristocracy, 
naturally looks up to the king as the 
father of the whole family, who, on his 
part, feels his position strengthened and 
his respect increased by performing with 
tact and firmness the delicate functions of 
a mediator. But the great social force 
which operates in giving prominence and 
predominance to the monarchy is War ; 
and, though war is unquestionably an evil, 
it is an evil only as death is, and a form 
of dying accompanied not seldom with an 
exhibition of more manhood than the ex- 
perience of many a peaceful deathbed can 
show. In fact, as stout old Balmerino 
said on the scaffold in 1 746, " The man 
who is not ready to die is not fit to live ; " 
that is, we hold our life under the condi- 



1 8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

tion that we may at any time be called on 
to sacrifice it, whether for the preservation 
of our own self-respect, or for the integrity 
of the community of which we are a mem- 
ber. All great nations, in fact, have been 
cradled in war, the Hebrews no less than 
the Greeks and Romans ; and it is only 
an amiable sentimentalism, pardonable in 
women, but inexcusable in men, that, in 
contemplation of the hard blows, red 
wounds, and gashed bodies with which 
war is accompanied, will allow itself to for- 
get the hardihood, endurance, courage, 
self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, 
of which, under Providence, it has always 
been the great training school. 1 There is 
no profession that I know more favorable 
to the growth of noble sentiment and 
manly action than that of the soldier ; and 
to its beneficial action in the formation of 
States every page of history bears naming 

1 6 (TTpaTiooTinhs (5'ios 7roAAa t^ei yuepTj tt)s apeTvjs. — AristOt. 

Pol. ii. 9. St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and 
Clemens Romanus (Oxon. 1633, p. 48) refer to the mili- 
tary profession as a great school of manly virtue. 



THE STATE. 1 9 

testimony. War, in fact, is the principal 
agent in producing that unification so ab- 
solutely necessary to social existence, but 
which is lost so soon as the headship of the 
common father of the expanded clan ceases 
to be recognized. Thus it was under the 
compulsion of war from their Lombardian 
neighbors on the west and Sclavonians 
on the east that the petty democratic com- 
munities, which after the disruption of the 
Roman Empire occupied the Venetian isles, 
found themselves, in the year 697, obliged 
to elect a king for life, wisely masking his 
absolute authority under the name of Doge 
or Duke. And in a similar fashion the situ- 
ation of the Piedmontese, constantly forced 
to defend themselves against Gallican and 
Teutonic ambition, begot in. them a stout- 
ness of self-assertion and a general man- 
hood of character which up to the present 
hour has placed them in favorable con- 
trast to the inhabitants of the southern half 
of the peninsula ; and the manhood dis- 
played by the Counts of Savoy in assert- 
ing their independence against great odds 



20 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace 
of Utrecht in 1 7 1 3, their lords were allowed 
to assume and maintain the title of kings 
— a circumstance which gave rise to the 
saying of Frederick the Great of Prussia, 
that the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue 
of their locality. 1 This is certainly true, 
not only of Sardinia, but of all States that 
ever rose above the loose aggregation of 
the original townships. It was the neces- 
sity of adjusting matters with troublesome 
neighbors that caused a perpetual succes- 
sion of petty wars ; and these could no! oe 
conducted without a prolongation of the 
power of the successful general, which acted 
practically as a kingship. The successful 
general in such times did not require to 
usurp a title which the people were forward 
to force upon him ; and only a few, we may 
imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had 
virtue enough to remain contented with 
the distinction belonging to a private sta- 
tion when the grace of the crown and the 
authority of the sceptre were formally 

1 Spalding's Italy, ii. p. 284. 



THE STATE. 21 

pressed upon them by a grateful people. 
So in Greece we find an early kingship 
signalized by the names of ^Egeus, The- 
seus, and Codrus ; so in Rome a succes- 
sion of seven kings, more or less distinctly 
outlined, the last of whom, Tarquin the 
Proud, stands forward as the head of the 
great Latin league, and entering in this 
capacity into a formal treaty with Car- 
thage, the great commercial state of the 
Mediterranean. Closely connected with 
war, or, more properly, as the natural de- 
velopment of it in its more advanced 
stages, we must mention Conquest; that 
is, the violent imposition of the results 
of a foreign civilization on the native so- 
cial foundations of any country. Here, 
no doubt, there may often be on the con- 
quering side something very different from 
a manly self-assertion — viz. self-aggran- 
dizement at the expense of an innocent 
neighbor, greed of territory, lust of power, 
and the vanity of mere military glory, 
which our brilliant neighbors the French 
were so fond to have in their mouth. The 



22 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

virtue of war as a training school of civic 
manhood does by no means exclude the 
operation of many forces far from admira- 
ble in their motive ; and it is the presence 
of these unholy influences, no doubt pi- 
ously brooded over, that has generated in 
the breasts of our mild friends the Qua- 
kers that anti-bellicose gospel which they 
preach with such lovable persistency. But 
whatever the motives of famous conquerors 
have been, the results of their achieve- 
ments in the great history of society have 
been most important. The imposition of 
a foreign type on the peoples of Western 
Asia by the brilliant conquests of Alexan- 
der the Great, gave to the whole of that 
valuable part of the world, along with the 
rich coast of Northern Africa, a common 
medium of culture of the utmost impor- 
tance to the future civilization of the race. 
The imposition of the Norman yoke goo 
years ago on this island gave to the con- 
tentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vig- 
orous stroke from without, that social con- 
sistency which the bloody strife of five 



THE STATE. 23 

centuries of petty kings and kinglets 
among themselves had failed to produce ; 
while in India the imposition of the most 
highly advanced mercantile and Christian 
civilization of the West on crude masses 
of an altogether diverse type of Asiatic 
society presents to the thoughtful student 
of history a problem of assimilation of 
an altogether unique character, the final 
solution of which, under the action of 
many complex forces, no most sagacious 
human intellect at the present moment can 
divine. On the other hand, it cannot be 
denied that the blessings which conquest 
brings with it, when vigorously managed 
and wisely used, are lightly turned into 
a bane whenever the power which has 
the force to conquer has not the wisdom 
to administer; of which unblissful lack of 
administrative capacity and assimilating 
genius the conquests of the Turks in Eu- 
rope, and of the English in Ireland, pre- 
sent a most instructive example. 

The monarchies created in the above 
fashion, by the combination of the old pa- 



24 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

triarchal habits with military necessities, 
however firmly rooted they may appear at 
the start, carry with them a certain germ 
of dissatisfaction, which, under the influ- 
ence of popular irritability, seriously en- 
dangers their permanence, and may at any 
time break up their consistency. The 
causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly 
the following: — (i) The original motive 
for creating a king, the pressure of foreign 
war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of 
peace will cease to operate, and the instinct 
of individual liberty, which belongs to all 
men, unless when violently stamped out, 
will revive, and cause the subjection of all 
men to the will of one to be looked on with 
disfavor. (2) This feeling will be specially 
strong with the aptcrrof, or natural aris- 
tocracy, whose individual importance must 
diminish as the power of the king in- 
creases. (3) A great danger will arise 
from the fixation of the order of succession 
to the throne. The natural tendency will 
be to follow the example of succession in 
private families, and recognize the right of 



THE STATE. 25 

the son to walk into the public heritage of 
his father ; but the additional influence 
thus given to the king will have a ten- 
dency to sharpen the jealousy of the no- 
bles. And, again, the son may be a weak- 
ling or a fool, and utterly unfit to play the 
part of a supreme ruler with that mixture 
of intelligence, firmness, and tact which the 
royal function for its fair and full action re- 
quires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these 
evils, the elective principle is maintained, 
either absolutely or within certain limits, 
the tendency to faction inherent in all ar- 
istocracies, stimulated by the potent spur 
of a competition for power, will be in- 
creased ; and this factious yeast will work 
so potently in the blood of the nobles that 
they will either reduce the power of the 
king to a mere name, and change the gov- 
ernment into an exclusive oligarchy, as in 
Venice, or they will even go the length of 
calling in foreign arbiters to heal their dis- 
sensions, which, as in the case of Poland, 
will naturally end in subjection to some 
foreign power; or, lastly, they will dis- 



26 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

pense with the kingship altogether, and re- 
turn to their original mixture of aristocracy 
and democracy with more firmly-defined 
functions and more reliable guarantees. 
(5) This result may be precipitated by 
some outbreak of that insolence which is 
so naturally fostered by the possession of 
absolute power; the sacred ness of personal 
property and the reverence of ancestral 
possession will not be respected by some 
Ahab of the day ; some young Tarquin or 
Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on the 
fair daughter of an humble citizen ; and 
then will be unsheathed the sword of a 
Brutus, and then uprise the song of a 
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which will 
sound a long knell to monarchy, during 
the manhood of a free, an independent, a 
self-reliant, and a self-governing people. 

The system of self-government thus in- 
troduced, as the natural fruit of the ele- 
ments out of which it arose, would be a 
mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with 
a decided predominance of the former ele- 
ment at starting, but with a gradually in- 



THE STATE. 27 

creasing momentum on the side of the 
inferior factor in proportion as the mass 
of the people excluded from aristocratic 
privileges by a necessary law of social 
orowth advanced in numbers and in social 
importance. Greece and Rome, or rather 
Athens and Rome, present to us here two 
types from which important lessons may 
be learned. In both the discarding of the 
kings was the work of the aristocracy ; but 
while the germ of the democratic element 
was equally strong in both, in Athens, 
partly from the genius of the people, partly 
from peculiar circumstances, this germ 
blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, 
and a more characteristic manhood ; where- 
as in Rome, in the most brilliant period 
of its political action, the form of govern- 
ment might rather be defined as a strong 
aristocracy limited by a strong democracy 
than a pure democracy, to which category 
Athens undoubtedly belongs. In both 
States the aristocratic element did not 
submit to the necessary curtailment of its 
power without a struggle ; but in Athens 



28 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the names of Solon (600 b. a), Clisthenes, 
Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked 
the early formation of a democracy almost 
totally purged from any remnant of aristo- 
cratic influence, at an epoch in its devel- 
opment corresponding to which we find 
Rome pursuing her system of world-wide 
conquest under a system of compromise 
between the patrician and the plebeian 
element, similar in some sort to what we 
see before our eyes at the present moment 
in our own country. To Athens, there- 
fore, we look, in the first place, for an 
answer to the question, What does history 
teach in regard to the virtue of a purely 
democratic government ? And here we 
may safely say that, under favorable cir- 
cumstances, there is no form of govern- 
ment which, while it lasts, has such a vir- 
tue to give scope to a vigorous growth and 
luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as 
a pure democracy. Instead of choking 
and strangling, or at least depressing, the 
free self-assertion of the individual, by 
which alone he feels the full dignity of 



THE STATE. 29 

manhood, such a democracy gives a free 
career to talent and civic efficiency in the 
greatest number of capable individuals ; 
but it does not follow that, though in this 
regard it has not been surpassed by any 
other form of government, it is therefore 
absolutely the best of all forms of govern- 
ment. All that we are warranted to say 
is, as Cornewall Lewis does, 1 that without 
a strong admixture of the democratic spirit 
humanity in its social form cannot achieve 
its highest results ; of which truth, indeed, 
we have the most striking proof before our 
eyes in our own happy island, where, even 
before the time which Mr. Green happily 
designates as Puritan England, powerful 
kings had received a lesson that as they 
had been elected so they might be dis- 
missed from office by the voice of London 
burghers. Neither, on the other hand, 
does it follow from the shortness of the 
bright reign of Athenian democracy — not 
more than 200 years from Clisthenes to 
the Macedonians — that all democracies 

1 On Method in Political Science. 



30 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

are short-lived, and must pay, like dissi- 
pated young gentlemen, with premature 
decay for the feverish abuse of their vital 
force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the 
power of what we may call a sort of Athe- 
nian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, 
instead of being weakened as it was by 
Aristides and Pericles, had been built up 
according to the idea of ^Eschylus and 
the intelligent aristocrats of his day, such 
a body, armed, like our House of Lords, 
with an effective negative on all outbursts 
of popular rashness, might have prevented 
the ambition of the Athenians from launch- 
ing on that famous Syracusan expedition 
which exhausted their force and maimed 
their action for the future. But the lesson 
taught by the short-lived glory of Athens, 
and its subjugation under the rough foot 
of the astute Macedonian, is not that de- 
mocracies, under the influence of faction, 
and, it may be, not free from venality, will 
sell their liberties to a strong neighbor — 
for aristocratic Poland did this in a much 
more blushless way than democratic Greece 



THE STATE. 3 1 

— but that any loose aggregate of inde- 
pendent States, given more to quarrel 
amongst themselves than to unite against 
a common enemy, whether democratic, or 
aristocratic, or monarchical in their form 
of government, cannot in the long run 
maintain their ground against the firm 
policy and the well-massed force of a strong 
monarchy. Athens was blotted out from 
the map of free peoples at Chaeronea, not 
because the Athenian people had too much 
freedom, but because the Greek States had 
too little unity. They were used by Philip 
exactly in the same way that Napoleon 
used the German States at the commence- 
ment of the present century. Divide et 
infera is the politician's most familiar 
maxim, which, when wisely and persist- 
ently applied, whether by an ancient Mace- 
donia or a modern Russia, will always give 
a strong monarchy a decided advantage 
over every other form of government. Sur- 
round me with a belt of petty principali- 
ties, says the despot, however highly civ- 
ilized and however w r ell governed, and I 



32 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

shall know to make them play my game 
and work themselves into confusion, till 
the hour comes when I may appear as a 
god to allay by my intervention the troubles 
which I have fostered by my intrigues. 

So much for Athens. Let us now see 
what lessons are to be learned from Rome. 
And here, on the threshold, it is quite 
plain that the abolition of kingship goes 
in the first place to strengthen the aris- 
tocracy, on whom as a body the supreme 
functions exercised by the monarch natu- 
rally devolve. The highly aristocratic type 
of the early Roman republic, unlimited 
from above by any superior power, and 
with only a slight occasional check from a 
plebeian citizenship in the tender bud, is 
universally admitted. Plainly enough also 
it stands written on the face of the early 
history of the Commonwealth that the ad- 
ministration of the aristocracy was marked 
in no ordinary degree by all that exclusive- 
ness, insolence, selfishness, and rapacity, 
which are the besetting sins of an order of 
men cradled in hereditary conceit, and eat- 



THE STATE. 33 

ing the bread not of labor, but of privilege, 
" das unverbesserliche Jtmkerthum" as 
Mommsen calls them. To such an extent 
did they abuse the natural vantage ground 
of their social position that, while the great 
body of the substantial yeomanry, who 
shed their blood in a constant succession 
of petty wars for the safety of the State, 
were stinted of their natural reward and 
degraded from their rightful position, the 
insolent monopolizers of all dignities and 
privileges did not blush to take from the 
people their natural heritage in the public 
land, and, for the enlargement of their own 
order, to deprive the State of its stoutest 
citizens, and the army of its most effective 
soldiers. The irritation produced by this 
insolent and anti-social procedure of the 
old Roman landlords, by the law of re- 
action common to all forces, produced as 
its natural consequence a revolt ; for, as it 
has been truly said that the blood of the 
martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less 
true is it in all history that the insolence 
of the aristocracy is the cradle of the de- 

3 



34 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

mocracy. That happened accordingly in 
ancient Rome which Sismondi prophesied 
might happen in modern Scotland : " If 
the mighty thanes who rule in those trans- 
Grampian regions begin to think that they 
can do without the people, the people may 
begin to think they can do without them." 1 
So at least the Roman plebs thought when, 
in the year of the city 259, they marched 
in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the 
banks of the Anio, and refused to return 
to the city till their just claims had been 
conceded and their wrongs redressed. 
Their wrongs . were redressed : confer- 
ences, concessions, and compromises, in a 
hurried and blundering sort of way, were 
made ; tribunes of the plebs were appointed, 
with the absolute power of stopping the 
whole machinery of the State with a single 
negation ; and thus was sown the seed of 
a democracy destined to grow into mon- 
strous proportions, and ripen into the 
bloody blossom of a military despotism by 
the hands of the very class of persons who 
were chiefly interested in preventing it. 

1 Sismondi, Etudes stir Veconomie politiqtte, Essai iv. 



THE STATE. 35 

The different stages of the battle be- 
tween plebeians and patricians, or, as we 
term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved 
themselves by a social necessity from time 
to time, belong to the special history of 
Rome, not to the general philosophy of 
history with which we are here concerned. 
The seed of democracy sown at the Sa- 
cred Mount went on from one stage of ex- 
pansion to another, breaking down every 
barrier of hereditary privilege between the 
mass of the people and the old aristocracy, 
till it ended in the Lex Hortensia, passed 
B. c. 288, which gave to all ordinances 
passed by the Comitia Tribtita — that is, 
the people assembled in local tribes and 
voting independently of all aristocratic 
check or co-operation — the full validity of 
law. And in this progress of equalization 
between class and class in a community, the 
Muse of history sees only a special illustra- 
tion of a general law that every aristocracy 
contending for the maintenance of exclu- 
sive privilege against natural right fights a 
losing battle. But the necessity of the 



36 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

adjustment of the opposing claims of a 
conservative and a progressive body in the 
State is a very different thing from the 
fashion in which the adjustment may be 
made, and from the consequences that 
may grow out of the adjustment. Here 
there is room for any amount of wisdom, 
and unfortunately also for a large amount 
of blundering. No man can say that the 
Roman constitution as it stood, after the 
plebeians had broken through all aristo- 
cratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted 
machine, or that it afforded any strong 
guarantee against that degeneracy into 
license towards which all unreined de- 
mocracies naturally tend. But one thing 
certainly was achieved. Out of the ple- 
beian and patrician elements of the body 
social, no longer arrayed in hostile attitude, 
but fronting one another with equal rights 
before the law, and adjusting their forces 
in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, there was 
formed a great political corporation, delib- 
erative and administrative, which for inde- 
pendence, dignity, patriotism, and saga- 



THE STATE. 37 

city, used its authority in such a masterly 
style and to such world-wide issues that it 
has earned from Mommsen the complimen- 
tary acknowledgment of having been " the 
first political corporation of all times." l 
This corporation was the Roman Senate, 
which ruled the policy of Rome for a 
period of 200 years, from the passing of 
the Hortensian Law through a long period 
of African and Asiatic wars down to the 
civil war of Sulla and Marius, 88 b. c. — 
a body of which we may perhaps best 
easily understand the composition and the 
virtue if we imagine the best elements of 
our House of Commons and the best ele- 
ments of the House of Lords merged in 
one Supreme Assembly of practical wis- 
dom, to the exclusion at once of the fever- 
ish factiousness and multitudinous babble 
of the one assembly, and the brainless ob- 
structiveness and incurable blindness of 
hereditary class interests in the other. 
But there was something else in the mixed 

1 With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. Com- 
parative Politics^ Lecture iii. p. 78. 



38 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

constitution of Rome besides the tried 
wisdom and the great practical weight of 
the Senate. What was that ? There was, 
in the first place, the evil of an elective 
kingship — for the Consul was really an 
annual king under a different name, as the 
President of the United States is a quad- 
riennial king, with greatly more power 
while his kingship lasts than the Queen of 
Great Britain ; and this implied an annual 
fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of 
a germ of faction ready to shoot into lux- 
uriance under the stronsr stimulant of the 
love of power. Then, as in the natural 
growth of society, a new aristocracy grew 
up, formed by the addition of the wealthy 
plebeian families to the old family aristoc- 
racy, and along with it a new and numer- 
ous plebeian body, practically though not 
legally excluded from the privilege of the 
optimates, the old antagonism of patri- 
cian and plebeian would revive, and the 
question arose, What machinery had the 
legislation of the previous centuries pro- 
vided to prevent a collision and a rupture 



THE STATE. 39 

between the antagonistic tendencies of the 
democratic and oligarchic elements in the 
State? The answer is, None. The au- 
thority of the Senate, great as it was both 
morally and numerically, was antagonized 
by the co-equal legislative authority of the 
Comitia Tribnta — an assembly as open 
to any agitator for factious or revolution- 
ary purposes as a meeting of a London 
mob in Hyde Park, and composed of ele- 
ments of the most motley and loose de- 
scription, ready at any moment to give the 
solemn sanction of a national ordinance 
to any act of hasty violence or calculated 
party move which might flatter the vanity 
or feed the craving of the masses. But 
this was not all. The tribunate, originally 
appointed simply for the protection of the 
commonalty against the rude exercise of 
patrician power, had now grown to such 
formidable dimensions that the popular 
tribune of the day might become the most 
powerful man in the State, and only re- 
quire re-election to constitute him into a 
king whose decrees the consuls and the 



40 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

senators must humiliate themselves to reg- 
ister. Here was a machinery cunningly, 
one might think, constructed for the pur- 
pose of working out its own disruption, 
even supposing both the popular and aris- 
tocratic elements had been composed of 
average good materials. But they were not 
so. In the age of the Gracchi, 133 b. c, 
the high sense of honor, the proud inher- 
itance of an uncorrupted patrician body, 
and the shrewd sense and sobriety of a 
sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally dis- 
appeared. The aristocracy were corrupted 
by the wealth which flowed in from the 
spoils of conquest; they had become 
lovers of power rather than lovers of 
Rome ; lords of the soil, not fathers of the 
people ; banded together for the narrow 
interests of their own order rather than for 
the general well-being of the community. 
The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the 
mass of the original popular assemblies 
had been composed, had partly dwindled 
away under maladministration of the pub- 
lic lands, and partly were mixed up with 



THE STATE. 4 1 

motley groups of citizens of no fixed res- 
idence, and of a town rabble who could 
be induced to vote for anything by any 
man who knew to win their favor by a 
large distribution of Sicilian corn or the 
exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows ; in a 
word, the populus had become a plebs, or, 
in our language, the people a populace. 
Furthermore, let it be noted that this 
people or populace, tied down to meet 
only in Rome, as the high seat of Govern- 
ment, was called upon to deal with the 
administration of countries as far apart 
and as diverse in character as Madrid and 
Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from 
London. Think of a mob of London arti- 
sans, on the motion of a Henry George, 
or even a rational Radical like Mr. Cham- 
berlain, drummed together to pass laws 
on landed property and taxation through 
all that vast domain ! But so it was ; and 
most unfortunately also the original fathers 
of the agitation which, at the time of the 
Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the 
world into two hostile factions, stabbing 



42 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

one another in the back and cutting one 
another's throats, and plotting and coun- 
ter-plotting in every conceivable style of 
baseness, after the fashion which is now 
being exemplified before us in Ireland, — 
the authors of this agitation were not the 
demagogues, but the aristocracy ; as indeed 
in all cases of general discontent, social 
fret, and illegal violence, the parties who 
are accused of stirring class against class 
are not the agitators who appear on the 
scene, but the maladministrators who made 
their appearance necessary. Man is an an- 
imal naturally inclined to obey and to take 
things quietly; insurrection is too expen- 
sive an affair to be indulged in by way of 
recreation; and there is no truth in the 
philosophy of history more certain than 
that whenever the multitude of the ruled 
rebel against their rulers, the original fault 

— I do not say the whole blame, for as 
things go on from bad to worse there 
may be blame and blunders on both sides 

— but the original fault and germinative 
cause, of discontent and revolt unquestion- 



THE STATE. 43 

ably lies with the rulers. Whatever may 
be said about Ireland and the Scottish 
Highlands, there can be no doubt that in 
the case of Rome the original cause of the 
democratizing of the old constitution and 
the over-riding of senatorial authority by 
tribunician ordinances was the senators 
themselves, who, in direct contravention 
of the public law of the State, with that 
greed for more land which is the beset- 
ting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered 
themselves, after the fashion of colonial 
squatters, on the public lands, and refused 
to surrender them to the State till com- 
pelled by the cry of popular right against 
might, raised by such patriotic and self- 
sacrificing agitators as the Gracchi — pa- 
triotic men who attained their object at 
last by the only means in their power, 
but means so drastic that, like doctor's 
drugs, they drave out one devil by bring- 
ing in a score, and paid for the partial 
healing of an incurable disease by destroy- 
ing for ever the balance of the constitution, 
and inaugurating with their own martyr 



44 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

blood one of the most woeful epochs in 
human history — an epoch varied by pe- 
riodical assassinations and consummated 
by wholesale butcheries. 

I said the Gracchi attained their object, 
and that by appointing a Commission for 
a distribution of the public lands, such as 
the friends of the crofters in the High- 
lands now propose for the repeopling of the 
old depopulated homes of the clan. But 
I said also that the disease under which 
Rome labored was incurable. How was 
this ? Simply because, whatever might 
have been the merits of the special Agra- 
rian Law carried by the Gracchi, the vio- 
lent steam by which the State machine 
was moved remained the same, the clumsy 
machine itself remained, and the materials 
with which it had to deal in a long and 
critical course of foreign conquest became 
every year larger and more unmanageable. 
It was not to be expected either, on the 
one hand, that a strong and influential 
aristocracy should die with a single kick, 
or, on the other, that a democracy, which 



THE STATE. 45 

had once learned the power of a popular 
flood to break down aristocratic dams, 
would cease to exercise that power when 
a convenient occasion offered. And so 
the strife of oligarchic and plebeian fac- 
tions continued. The political struggle, as 
always happens in such cases, became a 
struggle for personal supremacy; the san- 
guinary street battle between the younger 
Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though 
followed by a lull for a season, was re- 
newed after a few years in more startling 
form and much bloodier issues, first be- 
tween Marius and Sulla, and finally be- 
tween Caesar and Pompey. Such a suc- 
cession of embittered civil wars could end 
only in exhaustion and submission; and 
this is the last emphatic lesson which the 
history of Rome has taught to the gov- 
ernors of the people. Every constitution 
of mixed aristocratic and democratic ele- 
ments which fails by kindly control on 
the one side, and reasonable demand on 
the other, to achieve that balance of those 
antagonizing forces which means good 



46 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

government, must end in a military des- 
potism. That which will not bridle itself 
must be bridled ; and when constant irri- 
tation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are 
the bloody fruit of unchastened liberty, 
slavery and stagnation seem not too high 
a price to pay for peace. 

I have enlarged on the development 
and decay of the Roman republic, not 
only because in point of political achieve- 
ment Rome is by far the most notable of 
the great States of the world, but because 
in the struggle between aristocracy and 
democracy which was the salient feature 
of its history from the expulsion of the 
kings to the battle of Actium, it pre- 
sents a very close and instructive parallel 
to what has been going on amongst 
ourselves from the revolution settlement 
of 1688 to the present hour. If for 
annual kings with large power we put 
hereditary kings with small power, the 
parallel is complete. 1 Let us now cast a 

1 This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Ger- 
mans; sec particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40. 



THE STATE. 47 

glance, for time and space allow us no 
more, over some modern developments. 
The modern States of Europe have good 
reason, upon the whole, to think them- 
selves fortunate in their having retained 
the kingship, which the Greeks and Ro- 
mans rejected, either as their original type, 
or elevated and glorified from the duke- 
doms, margravates, and electorates with 
which they started. There cannot be 
much doubt, I imagine, that, if the Romans 
had retained their king in a hereditary or 
nearly hereditary form, he might have ex- 
ercised a mediatorial function between the 
contending parties that would have pre- 
vented those bloody strifes and those ugly 
civic wounds with which the record of 
their political career stands now so sorrow- 
fully defaced. In the experience of their 
own earliest story, Servius Tullius had 
already shown them how a king in the 
strife of classes might step in by a peace- 
ful new model to open the ranks of a close 
aristocracy with dignity and safety to a 
rising democracy; and in modern times 



48 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the case of Leopold II. of Tuscany does 
not stand alone as an example of what 
good service a wise king may do in the 
adjustment of contending claims and 
smoothing the march of necessary social 
transitions. In fact, the most democratic 
people amongst the ancients, in order to 
effect such an adjustment in a peaceful 
way, had been obliged to make Solon a 
king for the nonce ; and the Romans, 
urged by a like social pressure, named 
their dictator, or re-elected their consuls 
and their tribunes, in order to secure for 
the need of the moment that unity of 
counsel, energy of conduct, and moral 
authority which is the grand recommenda- 
tion of the kingship. No doubt kings in 
modern as in ancient times have erred ; 
they have not been able always to keep 
themselves sober under the intoxicating 
influence of absolute power, and they 
have paid dearly for their errors ; but we 
were wise in this country, while behead- 
ing one despot and banishing another, to 
punish the offender without abolishing 



THE STATE. 49 

the office. True, a thorough -going and 
sternly -consistent republican may ask, 
with an indignant sneer, What is the use 
of a king, when we have shorn him of all 
honors save the grace of a crown and the 
bauble of a sceptre — reduced him, in fact, 
to a mere machine to register the decrees 
of a democratic assembly ? But such per- 
sons require to be reminded that there is 
nothing more dangerous, not only in po- 
litical, but in all practical matters, than 
logical consistency ; that the most narrow- 
minded people are always the most consis- 
tent, and this for the very obvious reason 
that they have only room for one idea in 
their small brain chambers, whereas God's 
world contains many ideas, stiff ideas too, 
and given to battle, which must be brought 
into some friendly balance or compromise, 
or set about throat-cutting on a large scale 
— a process to which consistent republi- 
cans have never shown a less bloody incli- 
nation than consistent monarchists. They 
must be reminded also that the person of 
the monarch is an incarnated, visible, and 
4 



50 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

tangible symbol of the unity of the nation, 
of which parties and factions are so apt to 
be forgetful ; and if our logically-consistent 
republican may look on this as a matter of 
association and sentiment which he will 
not acknowledge, he must simply be told 
that the man who does not acknowledge 
the important place played by associations 
and sentiments in all matters of Church 
and State knows nothing of human nature, 
and is altogether unfit for meddling with 
the difficult and dangerous art of politics. 
He may write books, and lecture to cote- 
ries, and harangue electoral meetings, and 
delight himself largely in the reverberation 
of his own wisdom, but by all means let 
him not be a prime minister. To what 
ends logical consistency can lead a poli- 
tician in high places Charles I. and Arch- 
bishop Laud learned when it was too late ; 
and the fate of these two high-perched 
worthies stands as a speaking lesson to 
all politicians, whether of the democratic 
or the monarchical type, how easy a thing 
it is for a man to be a good Christian and 



THE STATE. 5 1 

a consistent thinker, and yet on all political 
matters a perfect fool. 

Among the notable modern States three 
stand before us with an exceptional pref- 
erence for the democratic form of govern- 
ment — Switzerland, France, and the great 
trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be 
regarded with curious interest and kindly 
human sympathy as great social experi- 
ments, by no means to be prejudged and 
denounced by any sweeping conclusions 
made from the unfortunate breakdown of 
the two celebrated ancient republics. The 
experiment in these cases, as made in alto- 
gether different circumstances and under 
different conditions, cannot warrant any 
such denunciations. The representative 
system which now universally prevails, and 
which enables a most widely-scattered and 
diverse-minded population to vote with a 
coolness and a precision and a large survey 
of which the urban system of Greece and 
Rome never dreamed ; the general growth 
of intelligence among all classes through 
the action of cheap education and the 



52 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

large circulation of cheap books ; the rapid 
and ever more rapid travelling of conta- 
gious thought from the centre to the ex- 
treme limbs and flourishes of social uni, 
ties; and, above all, let us hope the im, 
proved tone of social feeling in all the 
relations of man to man, which we owe to 
the great Christian principle of living as 
brother with brother, and sister with sister, 
under a common heavenly fatherhood, — 
these are all forces largely operating in the 
present day which justify us in hoping that 
many a social experiment which signally 
failed with the ancients may be crowned in 
the centuries which are now being inau- 
gurated with encouraging success. Of the 
three which we have named, Switzerland 
is the country in which, from topographical 
peculiarities, the interests of jealous neigh- 
bors, and the traditional habits of a peas- 
ant population well trained to provincial 
self-government, the permanence of a dem- 
ocratic federation may be prophesied with 
the greatest safety, but at the same time 
with the least interest to the general march 



THE STATE. 53 

of humanity. Ancient Rome, had it con- 
tinued as compact and as little disturbed by 
external forces and internal fermentations as 
modern Switzerland, might have remained 
during the whole course of its career as 
sober-minded and as stable as in the days 
of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which 
were displaced by huge absentee landlords, 
and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The case of 
France is altogether different. A repub- 
lic in an over-civilized, highly-centralized, 
bureaucratically-governed country, with a 
religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, 
and explosive people, seems of all social 
experiments the least hopeful : and that 
is all that can wisely be said of it at pres- 
ent. But the social conditions in Amer- 
ica are altogether different; and the ex- 
periment of a great democratic republic 
for the first time in the history of the world 
— for Rome in its best times, as we have 
seen, was an aristocracy — will be looked 
on by all lovers of their species with the 
most kindly curiosity and the most hope- 
ful sympathy. Here we have the stout, 



54 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

self - reliant, sober - minded Anglo - Saxon 
stock, well trained in the process of the 
ages to the difficult art of self-govern- 
ment ; here we have a constitution framed 
with the most cautious consideration, and 
with the most effective checks against 
the dangers of an over-riding democracy ; 
here also a people as free from any im- 
minent external danger as they have un- 
limited scope for internal progress. Un- 
der no circumstances could the experi- 
ment of self-government, on a great scale, 
have been made with a more promising 
start. No doubt they have a difficult 
and slippery problem to perform. The 
frequent recurrence of elections to the 
supreme magistracy has always been, and 
ever must be, the breeder of faction, the 
nurse of venality, and the spur of am- 
bition. Once already has this Titanic 
confederacy, though only a hundred years 
old, by going through a process of a long, 
bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that 
the unifying machinery so cunningly put 
together by the conservative genius of a 



THE STATE. 55 

Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, 
was insufficient to hold in check the re- 
bellious forces at war within its womb. 
No doubt also it were in vain to speak 
America free from those acts of gigantic 
jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding 
of the masses in various ways, which were 
working the ruin of Rome in the days of 
Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and 
the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New 
York has shown itself no less able to 
usurp the public land and defraud the 
people of their share in the soil than the 
lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing 
magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless 
we need not despair. The sins of Ameri- 
can democracy may serve as a useful hint 
to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed 
constitution without waiting for a verdict 
on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, 
lie with the gods ; nor, on the other hand, 
is there any wisdom in ascribing to the 
American form of government evils which, 
as belonging to human nature, crop up 
with more or less abundance under all 



56 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

forms of government, and which may be 
specially rife among ourselves. We also 
have our Glasgow banks, our bubble com- 
panies of all kinds, our heady speculations, 
our hot competitions, our over-productions, 
our haste to be rich, our idol worship of 
mere material magnificence, — these are 
evils, and the root of all evil, with the pro- 
duction of which no form of government 
has anything to do, and against which every 
form of government will be in vain invoked 
to contend. 

In conclusion, we must bear in mind 
that democracy or social self-government 
is the most difficult of all human problems, 
and must be approached, not with inflated 
hopes and rosy imaginations, but with so- 
briety and caution and a sound mind, and 
at critical moments not without prayer and 
fasting. Before entering on any scheme 
for rebuilding our social edifice on a dem- 
ocratic model, we should consider seriously 
what a democracy really implies, and what 
we may reasonably promise ourselves from 
its possible success. Of the two rallying 



THE STATE. 57 

cries which have made it a favorite with 
persons given to change, equality and 
liberty, the one is no more true than that 
all the mountains in the Highlands are as 
high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at 
the best that all men have an equal right 
to be called men and to be treated as men, 
while the other is only true so far as con- 
cerns the removal of all artificial barriers 
to the free exercise of each man's function, 
according to his capacity and opportuni- 
ties. But this is a mere starting-point in 
the social life of a great people. When 
the bird is out of the cage, which it must 
be in order to be a perfect bird, the more 
serious question emerges, what use it shall 
make of its newly-acquired liberty. Here 
certainly to men, as to birds, there are 
great dangers to be faced ; and with na- 
tions the progress of society, as already 
remarked, is measured to a much larger 
extent by the increase of limitations than 
by the extension of liberties. Then, again, 
the fundamental postulate of extreme de- 
mocracy that the majority have everywhere 



58 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

a right to govern is manifestly false. No 
man as a member of society has a natural 
right to govern : he has a right to be gov- 
erned, and well governed ; and that can 
only be when the government is conducted 
by the wisest and best men who compose 
the society. If the numerical majority is 
composed of sober-minded, sensible, and 
intelligent persons who will either govern 
wisely themselves or choose persons who 
will do so, then democracy is justified by 
its deeds ; but if it is otherwise, and if, 
when an appeal is made to the multitude, 
they will choose the most daring, the most 
ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, 
rather than the most sensible, the most 
moderate, and the most conscientious, then 
democracy is a bad thing, at least nothing 
better than the other ocracies which it sup- 
plants. It is manifest, therefore, that of 
all forms of government democracy is that 
which imperatively requires the greatest 
amount of intelligence and moderation 
among the great mass of the people, es- 
pecially amongst the lower classes, who 



THE STATE. 59 

have always been the most numerous ; 
and, as history can point to no quarter of 
the world where such a happy condition of 
the numerical intelligence has been real- 
ized, it cannot look with any favor on 
schemes of universal suffrage, even when 
qualified with a stout array of effective 
checks. The system, indeed, of represent- 
ing every man individually, and giving 
every member of a society a capitation 
vote, as they have a capitation tax in Tur- 
key however popular with the advocates of 
extreme democracy, seems quite unreason- 
able. What requires to be represented in a 
reasonable representative system is not so 
much individuals as qualities, capacities, 
interests, and types. Every class should 
be represented, rather than every man in 
a class. Besides, the equality of votes 
which democracy demands, on the princi- 
ple that I am as good as you and perhaps 
a little better, is utterly false, and tends to 
nourish conceit and impertinence, to ban- 
ish all reverence, and to ignore all distinc- 
tions in society. Anyhow, there can be 



60 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

no doubt that great masses of men acting 
together on exciting occasions are pecul- 
iarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent 
opinions ; all democracies, therefore, are 
unsafe which are unprovided with checks 
in the form of an upper chamber composed 
of more cool materials, and planted firmly 
in a position that makes them indepen- 
dent of the fever and faction of the hour 
A strong democracy stands as much in 
need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aris- 
tocracy does of a democratic spur. And 
let it never be forgotten — what democra- 
cies are far too apt to forget — that minor- 
ities have rights as well as majorities ; nay, 
that one of the great ends to be achieved 
by a good government is to protect the few 
against the natural insolence of a majority 
glorying in its numbers, and hurried on by 
the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A 
state of society is not at all inconceivable 
in which the many shall make all the laws 
and monopolize all the offices of a fussy 
bureaucracy, while the few are burdened 
with all the taxes. Never too frequently 



THE STATE. 6 1 

can we repeat, in reference to all public 
acts, no less than to the conduct of indi- 
viduals in private life, the great Aristotelian 
maxim that all extremes are wrong; 
that every force when in full action tends 
to an excess which for its own salvation 
must be met by a counterpoising force ; 
that all good government, as all healthy 
existence, is the balance of opposites and 
the marriage of contraries ; and that the 
more mettlesome the charger the more 
need of a firm rein and a cautious rider. 
He who overlooks this prime postulate of 
all sane action in this complex world may 
pile his democratic house tier above tier 
and enjoy his green conceit for a season ; 
but the day of sore trial and civic storm is 
not far, when the rain shall descend, and 
the floods come, and the winds blow and 
beat upon that house, and it will fall, be- 
cause it was founded upon a dream. 



II. 

THE CHURCH. 

Ov iras 6 Xeywv /jlol Kvpte, Kvpi€, eto-cXcwerat eis ttjv 
jSacriAeiav tujv ovpavuiv • dAA' 6 7roiujv to OeXyjjxa to9 7ra- 
rpos /xov tov iv Tots ovpavots. — 'O 20THP. 

Man is characteristically a religious ani- 
mal ; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only 
religious animal ; 1 for, though a dog has 
no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot 
be said with any propriety that he has re- 
ligious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, 
for a very good reason, because he has 
no ideas at all : observation he has very 
keen, and memory also wonderfully reten- 
tive ; instincts also, like all primal vital 
forces, divine and miraculous ; but ideas 

1 vivos yh.p &AA00 £aiov tyvxh ifpZira, fxkv 6ewv rcovrh, fi^yiara 
Kai KaWiara avvra^avTiav jjadrjTai on e*cri • ri 8e (pvKov aAAo 1) 
&vdp<i)Troi deovs Qepairevovo~i. — Xen. Mem. i. 4. 



THE CHURCH. 63 

certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge ; 
and brutes that have no language properly 
so called that is a system of significant 
vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only 
cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible 
signs expressive of sensations and feelings, 
can by no law of natural analogy be 
credited with the possession of a faculty 
of which they give no manifestation. 
Language is the outward body and form 
of which thought and reason and knowl- 
edge and ideas are the inward soul and 
force ; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike 
our modern scientists, who delight in con- 
founding man with the monkey, expressed 
language and reason with one word %6yog, 
while what we dignify with the name of 
language in birds and other animals w r as 
simply (povYi, or significant voice. If, there- 
fore, there is anything most human that 
history has to teach, it must be about reli- 
gion. All the great nations whose names 
mark the march of human fates have been 
religious nations. A people without reli- 
gion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it 



64 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

exists only as an abnormal and deficient 
specimen of the genus to which it belongs, 
which is of no more account in the just 
estimate of the type than a fox without 
a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue ; and 
as for individual atheists, who have been 
talked about in ancient times, and specially 
in these latter days, they are either phi- 
losophers like Spinoza, the most pious of 
men, falsely baptized with an odious title 
from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of 
the community, or, if they really are athe- 
ists, they are monsters which a man may 
stare at as at an ass with three heads or 
with no head at all in a show. 

The form in which religion generally 
presents itself in early history is what we 
commonly call Polytheism, though it is 
quite possible — a matter about which I am 
not careful curiously to dogmatize — that 
there may have been in some places an 
original Dualism, like the ancient Persian, 
or even a Monotheism, out of which the 
Polytheism was developed. For there 
cannot be the slightest doubt that, what- 



THE CHURCH. 65 

over may have been the starting-point, 
there lay in the popular theology a ten- 
dency to multiply and to reproduce itself 
in kindred but not always easily recogniz- 
able forms, like the children of a family 
or the cousinship of a clan. But, taking 
Polytheism as the type under which his- 
tory presents the objects of religious faith 
in the earliest times, we have to remark 
that under this common name, as in the 
case of Christianity, the greatest contrasts, 
both in speculative idea and in social effi- 
ciency, stare us everywhere in the face. In 
the eye of the Christian or the monotheis- 
tic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and 
of Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous; 
but, allowing that these anthropomorphic 
forms of divine forces and functions of the 
universe are equally destitute of a founda- 
tion in fact or reason, the reverence paid 
to them by a devout people might be as 
different as passion is from thought, and 
sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom 
in counsel and in action, the Athenian 
. Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a 
5 



66 WH - HISTORY TEACH? 

sway over her Hellenic worshippers as 
the ideal e: Christian womanhood, in the 
pers the Virgin Mary, does at the 

present day over millions of Christian 
worshippers. It is only when the cosmic 
function im Dated in the polytheistic 

am interior order, leaps from 
proper position of subordination and 
usurps the controlling and regulating 
action belonging to the superior function, 
that polytheistic idolatry becomes im- 
moral ; though, of course, the very facil- 
ity of this usurpation, and the stamp of a 
pseudo divinity that may thereby be given 
to beast '.v vice, is a sufficient reason for 
; denunciations of the heathen idola- 
tries so frequent in the Old Testament, 
which ultimately ripened into the spiritual 
apostleship and monotheistic aggression of 
St Paul. One other striking feature of all 
polvtheistic religions may not be omitted. 
Thev are naturally complete — more cath- 
olic, more sympathetic with universal na- 
ture and universal life than monotheistic 
religions ; if they make a philosophical 



THE CHURCH. 67 

mistake in worshipping many gods, they 
do not make a moral mistake in excluding 
any of his attributes. With the polythe- 
istic worshipper everything is sacred : the 
sun and the sea and the sky, dark earth 
and awful night, excite in him an emotion 
of reverence. If the Greek polytheist was 
devout at all, he was devout everywhere ; 
whereas, under monotheistic influences, 
there is a danger that devout feelings may 
respond exclusively to the stern decrees of 
an absolute lawgiver and the awful threat- 
enings of a violated law. Polytheistic 
piety, whatever its defects, was always 
ready to add a grace to every innocent 
enjoyment ; monotheistic religiousness, as 
we see its severe features in some mod- 
ern churches, contents itself with adding 
a solemn sanction to the moral law — a se- 
verity which here and there has not been 
able to keep itself free from the unlovely 
phase of regarding the innocent en; 
ments and the graceful pleasantries of life 
as a sin. 

So much for the soul of the business ; 



68 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the body is what we call the Church. 
And here the very word is significant. In 
one sense, as a separate ethical corpora- 
tion, the ancients had no Church. Why? 
Because Church and State were one ; or, 
if they were two, they were too like the 
famous Siamese twins that used to be car- 
ried about the country as a show, two so 
closely connected that they could no more 
be torn from one another and live than the 
limpet can be separated from the rock to 
which it clings.^ With the peoples of the 
ancient world the State was the Church 
and the Church was the State ; the priest 
was a magistrate and the magistrate was 
a priest. This identity of two things, or 
loose intercommunion and fusion of two 
things in modern association so instinc- 
tively kept apart, arose from the common 
germ out of which both Church and State 
grew — viz., as we saw in the previous lec- 
ture, the Family. Every father of a fam- 
ily, in the normal and healthy state of soci- 
ety, is his own priest as well as his own 
king. In religion and morals, as well as in 



THE CHURCH. 69 

all domestic ordinances, he is absolute 
and supreme; and the functions which 
necessarily belonged to him as supreme 
administrator in his own family would, un- 
der the influence of family feelings, nat- 
urally be conceded to him when the family 
grew to a clan, and the clan to a king- 
dom. And this is the state of things 
which we meet with in the Book of Gen- 
esis, long before the promulgation of the 
Mosaic law, where we read (xiv. 18) that 
Melchizedek, king of Salem, went out to 
bless Abraham, and he was priest of the 
Most High God; the distinction between 
priest and layman, to which our ears are 
so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand 
other well-known instances, altogether ig- 
nored. Not only in Homer, where we find 
Agamemnon, the king of men, perform- 
ing sacrificial functions without even the 
presence of a priest, 1 but in the sober his- 
torical age we find the King of Sparta per- 
forming all the public sacrifices — being 
in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of 

1 Iliad % iii. 271 ; and compare Virgil, jEneid, ill- 80. 



JO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

Jove. 1 So closely indeed was the State re- 
ligion identified with the person of the su- 
preme magistrate that, when the kingship 
was abolished in Greece, and three princi- 
pal archons and seven secondary ones 
shared his functions, one still retained the 
title of (3aotXevg, king, and had the supervis- 
ion, or, as we would say, supreme episco- 
pacy and overseership of all matters per- 
taining to religion. 2 The same thing took 
place in Rome, where the name of king 
was even more odious than in Greece ; but 
nevertheless a rex sacrificuhis, or king-sac- 
rijicer, with his regina or queen, took rank 
in all the public pontifical dinners above 
the pontifex maximus himself. The col- 
lege of pontiffs in Rome, which had the su- 
preme direction of all religious matters, was 
not a board of priests, but of laymen — or 
at least of laymen who, without any quali- 
fication but some inaugurating ceremony, 
might be assumed into the pontifical col- 
lege ; whence the title of pontifex maximus, 

1 Xen. Rep. Lac. i. 15 ; Herod, vi. 56. 

2 Pollux, viii. 90. 



THE CHURCH. 7 1 

which the emperors assumed, was no more 
of the nature of a usurpation than the title 
of imperator, which belonged to them as 
supreme commanders of the army. Who, 
then, were the priests, and what need of 
them at all, if the laity might legally per- 
form all their functions ? The answer is 
simple. Both in Greece and Rome there 
were priests and priestly families, as the 
EumolpidcB in Eleusis, specially dedicated 
to the service of certain local gods ; but 
there was no order, class, or body of per- 
sons having the exclusive right to of- 
ficiate in sacred matters over the whole 
community. No doubt the social position 
of priests in democratic Greece and mo- 
narchical Egypt was extremely different, 
but in one respect they were identical: 
in Athens Church and State were one as 
much as in Memphis. In Egypt there 
was a remarkably strong body or clan of 
priests enjoying the highest dignities and 
immunities ; but there is no proof that 
they were a caste, in the strict sense of the 
word ; and their virtues were so far from 



72 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

being incommunicable that, when the Pha- 
raoh did not happen to be a born priest, 
but of the military class, he was obliged 
to be made a priest before he could be a 
king; and when once king he became 
ipso facto the high priest of the nation, 
and took precedence of all priests in all 
great public acts of religious ceremonial. 
It must not be supposed, however, that, 
though he was supreme in all sacred mat- 
ters and the actual head of the Church, 
to use our language, he could set himself, 
like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for 
the people, and imprison or burn devout 
persons for refusing to acknowledge his 
arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred 
functions in the hands of the masterful 
Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was 
a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people 
as their readiest and most effective way of 
getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman 
Pope, which in those days pressed like 
an incubus on the European conscience; 
it was invoking one devil to turn out an- 
other, and was successful, as such opera- 



THE CHURCH. J3 

tions are wont to be, in a blundering sort 
of way. But the worshipful " Sons of the 
Sun" — for so they were betitled — on 
the banks of the sweet-watered Nile, had 
no monstrous pretension of this kind, and 
could not even have dreamt of it. They 
did not sit on the throne to reform relig- 
ion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt 
nor in Greece in those days was any such 
thing known as the rights of the individual 
conscience ; but both kings and people re- 
ceived religious laws and consuetudes as 
we do Magna Charta ; reasonable people, 
in the Ions: course of the centuries before 
Christ, would no more dream of disturbing 
the ancestral belief about the gods than 
they would think of influencing the set- 
tled courses of the stars. It was their very 
deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of 
the startling mutabilities to which human 
affairs are liable, that made the fundamen- 
tal truths of religion so valuable to their 
souls ; and as to the particular forms under 
which these fundamental truths might have 
been symbolized by venerable tradition, the 



74 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

people were not given to form themselves 
into hostile camps on the ground of any 
local difference, as we do in Scotland about 
ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets ; and 
every devout Egyptian allowed his neigh- 
bor without offence to pay sacred hon- 
ors to a crocodile or a cat, convinced that 
these honors were equally legitimate and 
equally beneficial whenever the sacred 
symbolism peculiar to the worship was 
wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, 
between Church and State, or between 
priesthood and kingship, such as signalized 
the medieval struggles of the Popes and 
Emperors, and the convulsions of our in- 
fant Protestant freedom in England, could 
not take place amongst the ancient poly- 
theists. A wise Socrates was equally 
willing with the most superstitious dev- 
otee, when pious gratitude called, to sac- 
rifice a cock to yEsculapius ; and the vofio) 
noleidq, by the custom of the State, was 
the direction which he gave to all who 
inquired of him by what rites they ought 
to worship the gods. 1 Only amongst the 

1 Xen. Mem. i. 3. 



THE CHURCH. 75 

Hebrews, as a people in whose religious 
habitude polytheistic and monotheistic 
tendencies had never come to any deci- 
sive settlement of their inherent antago- 
nism, do I find a record of a very serious 
collision between Church and State, after 
the fashion of our German Henries and 
Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of 
Papal aggression. Scotsmen familiar with 
their Bibles will easily see that I allude 
to the case of Uzziah, as recorded in 2 
Chron. xxvi. 16-20: — "But when he 
was strong, his heart was lifted up to his 
destruction: for he transgressed against 
the Lord his God, and went into the tem- 
ple of the Lord to burn incense upon the 
altar of incense. And Azariah the priest 
went in after him, and with him four- 
score priests of the Lord, that were val- 
iant men : And they withstood Uzziah the 
king, and said unto him, It appertaineth 
not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense 
unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons 
of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn 
incense : go out of the sanctuary ; for thou 



76 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

hast trespassed ; neither shall it be for 
thine honor from the Lord God. Then 
Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his 
hand to burn incense : and while he was 
wroth with the priests, the leprosy even 
rose up in his forehead before the priests 
in the house of the Lord, from beside the 
incense altar. And Azariah the chief 
priest, and all the priests, looked upon 
him, and, behold, he was leprous in his 
forehead, and they thrust him out from 
thence ; yea, himself hasted also to go out, 
because the Lord had smitten him." 

So much for Polytheism. That it 
should have served the spiritual needs of 
the human heart so long — five thousand 
years at least, from the first Pharaoh that 
looked down from his Memphian pyramid 
on the mystic form of the Sphinx, to the 
last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white 
bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the 
Capitoline Jove — is proof sufficient that, 
with all its faults, it was made of very ser- 
viceable stuff; but creeds and kingdoms, 
like individuals, must die. At the com- 



THE CHURCH. 77 

mencement of the eighth century of the 
Roman Republic heathenism was doomed 
in all Romanized Europe, in all Northern 
Africa, and in Western Asia, and that for 
four reasons. The polytheistic religions of 
the Old World, created as they were in 
the infancy of society, no doubt under 
the guidance of a healthy instinct of de- 
pendence on the ruling power of the uni- 
verse, but in the main inspired by the 
emotions and formulated by the imagina- 
tion, without the regulating control of rea- 
son, could not hope to hold their ground 
permanently in the face of that rich growth 
of individual speculation which, from the 
sixth century before Christ, spread with 
such ample ramification from Asiatic and 
European Greece over the greater part of 
the civilized world. If it was a necessity 
of human beings at all times to have a re- 
ligion, it was a no less urgent problem, as 
the range of vision enlarged with the pro- 
cess of the ages, to harmonize their the- 
ology with their thinking. And if, on the 
intellectual side, the polytheistic religions 



78 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

of that cultivated age were threatened 
with a collapse, the sensuous element, 
always strongly represented in emotional 
faiths, was in constant danger of bei 



£> v 



in 



g 

dragged down into a disturbing and de- 
grading sensuality. Then, again, when the 
Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus 
Caesar, had completed the range of its 
world - wide conquests, two social forces, 
unknown in the best ages of Greece and 
Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their 
perilous momentum to the corrupting ele- 
ments which were already at work in the 
bosom of the polytheistic system. And in 
what a hot -bed of fermenting putridity 
these evil leavens had resulted at this 
period, the pages of Suetonius and many 
chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally 
credible and equally tragic. Add to all this 
the fact that the motley intermixture of 
ideas and the inorganic confusion and 
forced assimilation of creeds, which accom- 
panied the universal march of Roman 
polity, brought about a vague desire for 
some sort of religious unity which might 



THE CHURCH. 79 

run parallel with the political unity under 
which men lived ; and this desire could be 
gratified only by placing in the foreground 
the great truth of the unity of the Supreme 
Being, which to vindicate in pre-Christian 
ages had been the special mission of the 
Hebrew race, and which the Greeks them- 
selves had not indistinctly indicated by 
placing the moral government of the world 
and the issues of peace and war in the 
hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-benefi- 
cient, and absolute Jove. These and the 
like considerations will lead the thought- 
ful student of history easily to understand 
how the appearance of such an extraordi- 
nary moral force as Christianity was im- 
peratively called for at the period when 
our Saviour, with His divine mission to a 
fallen race, began His preaching on the 
shores of a lonely Galilean lake ; and the 
most superficial glance at the contents of 
His preaching, as contrasted with the 
heathenism which it replaced, will show 
how wonderful was the new start which 
it gave to the moral life of the world, and 



80 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

how effective the spur which it applied to 
the march of the ages — a spur so potent 
that we may, without the slightest exag- 
geration, say that to Christianity we owe 
almost exclusively whatever mild agencies 
tempered the harshness and sweetened the 
sourness of crude government in the Mid- 
dle Ages ; and no less, whatever hopeful 
elements are at the present moment work- 
ing among ourselves to save the British 
people, at a critical stage of their social 
development, from the decadence and the 
degradation that overtook the Romans af- 
ter their great military mission had been 
fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the 
main constituents of that new leaven where- 
with Christianity was equipped to regen- 
erate the world. These I find to be — 

(i.) By asserting in the strongest way 
the unity of God, it at once cut the root of 
the tendency in human nature to create 
arbitrary objects of worship according to 
the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and 
accustomed the popular intelligence to a 
harmonized view of the various forces at 



THE CHURCH. 8 1 

work in the constitution of a world so 
various and so complex as to a superficial 
view readily to appear contradictory and 
irreconcilable. 

(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not 
as an abstract metaphysical idea, but as 
what it really is, a divine fatherhood, 
Christianity at one stroke bound all men 
together as brethren and members of a 
common family ; and in this way, while in 
the relation of nation to nation it substi- 
tuted apostleships of love for wars of sub- 
jugation, in the relation of class to class it 
established a sort of spiritual democracy, 
in which the implied equality of all men as 
men gradually led to the abolition of the 
abnormal institution of slavery, on which 
all ancient society rested. 

(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as 
an independent moral association alto- 
gether separate from the State, at once 
purified the sphere of the Church from 
corrupting elements, and confined the 
State within those bounds which the 

nature of a civic administration furnishes. 
6 



82 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

Religion in this way was purified and 
elevated, because in its nicely segregated 
sphere no secular considerations of any 
kind could interfere to tone down its 
ideal, direct its current, or lame its effi- 
ciency ; while the State, on the other hand, 
was saved from the folly of intermeddling 
with matters which it did not understand, 
and professing principles which it did not 
believe. 

(4.) Christianity, by planting itself em- 
phatically at the very first start, as one 
may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in 
direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonial- 
ism, and every variety of externalism, and 
placing the essence of all true religion in 
regeneration, or, as St. Paul has it, a new 
creature — i. e. the legitimate practical dom- 
inance of the spiritual and ethical above 
the sensual and carnal part of our nature 
— broke down the middle wall of partition 
which had so often divided piety from 
morality; so that now a man of culture 
might consistently give his right hand to 
religion and his left hand to philosophy, 



THE CHURCH. 83 

an attitude which, so long as Homer was 
all that the Greeks had for a bible, no 
devout Hellenist could assume. 

(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future 
life as a guiding prospect in the foreground, 
the religion of Christ gave the highest pos- 
sible value to human life, and the strong- 
est possible spur to perseverance in a vir- 
tuous career. 

(6.) By appealing directly to the indi- 
vidual conscience, and making religion a 
matter of personal concern and of moral 
conviction, it raised the value of each 
individual as a responsible moral agent, 
and placed the dignity of every man as 
a social monad on the firmest possible 
pedestal. 

(7.) By making love its chief motive 
power, it supplied both the steam and the 
oil of the social machine with a continuity 
of moral force never dreamt of in any of 
the ancient societies — a force which no 
mere socialistic schemes for organizing 
labor, no boards of health, no political 
economy, no mathematical abstractions, no 



84 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

curiosities of physical science, no demo- 
cratic suffrages, and no school inspector- 
ships, though multiplied a thousand times, 
apart from this divine agency, can ever 
hope to achieve. 

Thus equipped with a moral armature 
such as the world had never yet seen, it 
might have been expected that the triumph 
of Christianity over the ruins of heathen- 
ism would have been as complete and as 
pure from all admixture of evil as it ap- 
pears in the great evangelical manifesto 
commonly called the Sermon on the Mount. 
But it was not to be so ; nor, indeed, cre- 
ated as human nature is, could possibly be. 
The miraculous virtue of the seed could 
not change the nature of the soil, and the 
sweet new wine put into old bottles could 
not fail to catch a taint from the acid in- 
crustations of the original liquor. Cor- 
ruptia optimi pessima is the great lesson 
which history everywhere teaches, and no- 
where with a more tragic impressiveness 
than in the history of the Christian Church. 
What a rank crop of old wives' fables, 



THE CHURCH. 85 

endless genealogies, ceremonial observ- 
ances, worship of the letter, voluntary 
humilities, and disputations of science, 
falsely so called, started into fretful array 
before the spiritual swordsmanship of St. 
Paul, no reader of the grandest correspond- 
ence in the world need be told ; but it was 
not so much from Jewish drivel, Attic 
subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism, that the 
corrupting forces were to proceed which 
in the post-Apostolic age insinuated them- 
selves like a poison into the pure blood of 
the Church. It is from within that, in 
moral matters, our great danger flows : if 
the kingdom of heaven is there, the king- 
dom of hell is there no less distinctly. 
The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching 
of history that all extremes are wrong, 
is ever and ever repeated to passion- 
spurred mortals, and ever and ever for- 
gotten. In the green ardor of our worship 
we make an idol of our virtue ; the strong 
lines of the particular excellence which we 
admire are stretched into a caricature ; our 
sublime, severed from all root of sound- 



86 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

ness, reels over into the ridiculous; we 
revel and riot and get into an intoxicated 
excitement with the fruit of our own fancy ; 
and work ourselves from one stage of in- 
flammation to another, till, as our great 
dramatist says, 

" Goodness, grown to a pleurisy, 
Dies of its own too much." 

The excess into which Christianity at 
its first start most naturally fell was ultra- 
spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever 
name we may choose to characterize that 
high-flying system in morals which, not 
content with the regulation and subordina- 
tion, aims at the violent subjugation and, 
as much as may be, the total suppression 
of the physical element in man. How 
near this abuse lay is evident, not only 
from the general tendency of every man 
to make an idol of his distinctive virtue, 
and of every sect to delight in the exag- 
geration of its most characteristic feature, 
but there are not a few passages of the 
New Testament which plainly show that 
the masculine Christianity of St. Paul had 



THE CHURCH. 87 

not more occasion to protest against those 
Greek libertines who turned the grace of 
God into licentiousness, than against those 
offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who pro- 
fessed a self-imposed arbitrary religiosity 
(Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry 
and commanding to abstain from meats 
(1 Tim. iv. 3). 1 There is, indeed, some- 
thing very seductive in these attempts to 
acquire a superhuman virtue, whether they 
be made by a poet casting off the vul- 
gar bonds that bind him to his fellows, 
like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may 
feed upon sun-dews and get drunk on tran- 
scendental imaginations, or by a religious 
person, that he may devote himself to 
spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing 
influence of earthly passions. Such a re- 
nunciation of the flesh gratifies his pride, 
and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic 
virtue in a special line ; while, at the same 

1 From the SiSaxri tS>v hirovTSxwv, or Early Teaching 
of the Apostles, lately discovered, ch. viii., we learn 
that it was the custom of the early Christians to observe 
two days of fasting in the week — Wednesday and Fri- 
day.— Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885. 



88 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

time, it is with some persons more con- 
venient, inasmuch as when the resolution 
is once formed and a decided start made, 
it is always easier to abstain than to be 
moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious 
schemes to ignore the body and to cut 
short the natural rights of our physical 
nature must fail. It never can be the 
virtue of a man to wish to be more than 
man ; and every religion which sets a stamp 
of special approval on superhuman, and 
therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of 
separation between the gospel which it 
preaches and the world which it should 
convert. In fact, it rather gives up the 
world in despair, and institutes an artificial 
school for the practice of certain select 
virtues, which only a few will practise, and 
which, when practised, can only make 
those few unfit for the social position 
which Providence meant them to occupy. 

The second excess into which Chris- 
tianity, under the action of frail human 
nature, easily ran was intolerance. This 
intolerance, as in the previous case, is 



THE CHURCH. 89 

only a virtue run to seed ; for, as all 
asceticism is merely a misapplication or 
an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial 
and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect 
of kindly regard to the contrary in opinion 
or conduct, is merely a crude or an im- 
politic extension of the imperative ought 
which lies at the root of all moral truth, 
and specially of all monotheistic religions. 
There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in 
truth which will not allow it to hold 
parley with error; and every new religion 
with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a 
divine mission, is necessarily aggressive : 
it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral 
authority, and marches right into the pres- 
ence of hoary absurdity and consecrated 
stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary 
here which the divine wisdom of the Son 
of God pointed at emphatically enough 
when he was asked to bring down fire 
from heaven on those who taught or did 
otherwise ; but the evil spirit of self-im- 
portance which prompted this request was 
too deeply engrained in human nature to 



90 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

be eradicated by a single warning of the 
great teacher. This spirit of arrogant in- 
dividualism asserted itself at an early pe- 
riod in the disorderly Corinthian Church 
very much in the same way as it does 
amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, 
at the present moment — viz., by the 
multiplication of sects, the exaggeration 
of petty distinctions, and the fomenting 
of petty rivalries, — " Now this I say, 
that every one of you saith, I am of 
Paul ; and I of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ; 
and I of Christ "(i Cor. i. 12), — a spirit 
which the apostle most strongly denounces 
as proceeding manifestly from the over- 
rated importance of some secondary spe- 
cialty, or some accessory- condition, of the 
body of believers, who thus clubbed them- 
selves into a denomination, and resulting 
in an unkindly divergence from the com- 
mon highway of evangelic life, and an in- 
tolerant desire to override one Christian 
brother with the private shibboleth of an- 
other, and to stamp him with the seal of 
their own conceit. The field in which this 



THE CHURCH. 9 1 

intolerant spirit displayed itself was of 
course different, according to the influences 
at work at the time ; but there is one field 
which, if church history is to teach us any- 
thing, we are bound to emphasize strongly, 
that is the field of dogma ; for, if there be 
any influence that has worked more power- 
fully to discredit Christianity than even the 
immoral lives and selfish maxims of pro- 
fessing Christians, it is the fixation and 
glorification and idol-worship of the dogma. 
No doubt Christianity is far from being 
that system, or rather no system, of vague 
and cloudy sentiment to which some per- 
sons would reduce it: it has bones, and 
a firm framework ; it stands upon facts, 
and is not without doctrines, but it does 
not make a parade of doctrines; and the 
faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from 
the definition and historical examples in 
Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in 
the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, 
but a living faith in the moral government 
of the world and a heroic conduct in life, 
as the necessary expression of such faith. 



92 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which 
the Christian Church has, by the tradition 
of centuries, placed such a high value, is, 
in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth 
nothing; for the devils also believe and 
tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord 
himself said in the striking summation to 
the Sermon on the Mount, " Not they who 
call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the 
kingdom, but they who do the will of my 
Father who is in heaven. By their works, 
not by their creed, ye shall know them." 1 
Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma 
has always been a favorite tendency of the 
Church, and the besetting sin of the 
clergy. With the mass of the people, to 
sw r ear to a curious creed is always more 
easy than to lead a noble life ; while to 
the clerical intellect it must always give a 
secret satisfaction to think that the science 
of theology, which is the furthest removed 

1 In the Sidaxb r<Z>v aTrocrrSxcav there is absolutely no 
dogma. It is all practice, and this is quite in harmony 
with the use of SiBaxh by St. Paul (i Tim. i. 10), and in- 
deed with the whole tone of these two admirable epistles. 



THE CHURCH. 93 

from the handling of the great mass of 
men, has in their hands assumed a well- 
defined shape, of which the articulations 
are as subtle and as necessary as the steps 
of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. 
The late Baron Bunsen, for many years 
Prussian ambassador in London, one of 
the most large-minded and large-hearted 
of Christian men, in the preface to his 
great Bibehverk, devotes a special chapter 
to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical 
mind leading to false views of Scripture ; 
over and above what he calls the modern 
revival of scholastic theology in Germany, 
he enumerates four dominant epochs of 
ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evan- 
gelical tendency has prominently asserted 
itself. These are— (i) the dogmatism of 
the great Church councils in the reigns of 
Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian; 
(a) the medieval scholasticism of the 
Western Church ; (3) the Protestant 
scholasticism of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries ; (4) the dogmatism of the 
Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had 



94 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

this dogmatic tendency of the Church 
contented itself with tabulating a curious 
scheme of divine mysteries, though it 
might justly have been deemed imperti- 
nent, and here and there a little presump- 
tuous, yet it might have been condoned 
lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in 
hours which might have been worse em- 
ployed ; but it could not be content with 
this : it passed at once into action, and in 
this guise prevailed to deface the fair front 
of the Church with gashes of more bloody 
and barbarous inhumanity than ever 
marked the altars of the Baals and Molochs 
of the most savage heathen superstitions. 

Another monstrous abuse born out of 
the bosom of the Church, though not so 
directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so 
directly, because the genius of Christian- 
ity is so distinctly negative of all priest- 
hood that, had there been even an ex- 
press prohibition of it, its contradiction 
to the whole tone of the New Testament 
could not have been more apparent. Not 
more certainly are the sacrifices of the 



THE CHURCH. 95 

Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of 
Christ, according to the Pauline theology, 
than the Levitical priesthood stands abol- 
ished in the priesthood of Christ and in 
the priesthood of the individual members 
of his spiritual body (2 Peter v. 9). 1 
Whence, then, came our Christian priest- 
hood ? Partly, I suspect, as the Jewish 
Sabbath was interpolated into the Chris- 
tian Lord's Day, from the nearness and 
external similitude of the two things — the 
presbyter being to the outward eye pretty 
much the same as the priest was to the 
Jewish worshippers ; partly from the self- 
importance which is the besetting sin of all 
bodies of men prominently planted in the 
social platform, and which induces them to 
magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt 
their professional pride up into the attitude 
of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. 
The proper functions of the office-bearers 

1 In the SiSaxv v&v airoarSxcou, ch. xiii., the " prophets " 
are said to be to Christians what thfe " high priests " were 
to the Jews, — a phraseology which could not possibly 
have been used had any priesthood, in the Hebrew sense, 
existed in the early Church. 



96 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

of the early Christian Church, call them 
overseers, bishops, or what you will, were 
so honorable and so beneficent that, es- 
pecially with an unlearned and unthinking 
people, the reverential respect clue to the 
actors might easily pass into a supersti- 
tious belief in the mystical virtue of the 
operations of which they were the con- 
ductors ; and this ready submission on the 
part of the people, holding out a willing 
hand to the natural self-importance and 
potentiated self-estimate of the clerical 
body, resulted in a four-square system of 
sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and 
sacerdotal influence, to which we shall 
search for a parallel in vain through all 
the annals of Asiatic and African hea- 
thenism. Nay, I can readily believe that 
those who can find a priesthood in the 
genius of the gospel and the apostolic 
institution of the Christian Church will 
naturally be inclined to maintain that the 
superior power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, 
and Innocents of the medieval Church, as 
contrasted with anything that we read or 



THE CHURCH. i" 

know of the Egyp " 

pontiffs, is the natural and nee :ut- 

come of the superior excellence of the 
Christian religion; and this, no doub: 
the only comfortable belief on which all 
forms of Chrir:::." sacerdotalism ::.:. re- 
pose. 

So much for the corruptions of the 
Christian religion proceeding from what, 
in theological language, might be called 
the indwelling sin of the Church, unstim- 
ulated by any strong external seduction. 
But this seduction came. After three 
tunes ndshij manfully endured 

in the school of a~ the more 

trial of prosperity had to be gone through. 
The Church, which had been declared to 
be not of this \nd had stood face : : 

face with the g : political power the 

world ever knew in a position of sublime 
moral isolation, was now adopted by the 
- :e, and formed a bond of the most in- 
timate connection with its hereditary per- 
secutors. The starting-point of the oldest 
heathen social attitude, the identity of 

7 



gS WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

Church and State, seemed to be recalled ; 
and a Justinian on the shores of the Bos- 
phorus seemed as really a head of the 
Church as a Menes or an Amenophis on 
the banks of the Nile. But under the 
outward likeness a radical difference lay 
concealed. As an essentially ethical so- 
ciety, with its own special credentials, its 
separate history, and its independent tri- 
umph, the Christian Church might form 
an alliance with a purely secular institu- 
tion like the State, but it could not be ab- 
sorbed or identified with it. That alliance 
might be made beneficially in various ways 
and on various terms; the civil magistrate 
might be proud to be called the friend and 
the brother of the Christian bishop, or he 
might humble himself to be its servant, 
but he never could be its master. The 
alliance therefore was, as it ought to be, 
all in favor of the spiritual body ; the 
Church gained the civil power to execute 
its decrees and to patronize its missions; 
but a Christian State could never gain 
the right to dictate the creed or perform 



THE CHURCH. 99 

the functions of the Church. The idea 
that there is anything absolutely sinful, or 
necessarily pernicious, in the conception of 
an alliance between the Church and the 
State, is one of those hyperconscientious 
crotchets of modern British sectarianism 
at which the Muse of history can only 
smile. There can be no greater sin in an 
Established Church than in an Established 
University or an Established Royal Acad- 
emy. Religion and Science and Art have 
their separate and well-marked provinces, 
in the administration of which they may 
wisely seek for the co-operation, though 
they will always jealously avoid the dicta- 
tion, of the State. But, though there 
could be no sin in the Church receiving the 
right hand of fellowship from the State, 
there might be danger, and that of a very 
serious description. Nothing strikes a 
man so much in the reading of the New 
Testament as the little respect which it 
pays to riches and the pomp and pride 
of life, and worldly honors and dignities 
of all kinds. "How can ye believe who 



IOO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

receive honor one from another ? " is a 
sentence that cuts very deep into the con- 
nection between the Church and State, 
which might readily mean the alliance of a 
secular institution, delighting in pomp and 
parade and glittering show, with a religion 
of which, like the philosophy of the porch, 
the most prominent feature was unworld- 
liness, humility, and spirituality. Here 
unquestionably was danger: an alliance in 
which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the 
lower element was as likely to drag down 
the higher as the higher to lift up the 
lower. And so it actually happened. The 
Church was secularized. Alongside of the 
hundred and one monkeries of stolid as- 
ceticism and the hundred and one mum- 
meries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there 
grew up in the process of the ages a con- 
solidated hierarchy of such concentrated, 
secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest 
crowned heads of Europe ducked beneath 
its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. 
To understand this, we must take note of 
the change by which the scattered pres- 



THE CHURCH. IOI 

byters of the primitive Church were grad- 
ually massed into a strong aristocracy, 
which in due season, after the fashion of 
the State, found its key-stone in an eccle- 
siastical monarch. It was the wisdom of 
the founders of the Christian Church not 
to lay down any fixed form of official ad- 
ministration, but to leave all the external 
machinery of a purely spiritual institution 
free to adapt itself to the existing forms 
of society as time and circumstance and 
national genius might demand. The form 
of government natural to the Church in 
its earliest stages was democratic, with a 
certain loose, ill-defined element of pres- 
idential aristocracy. But in an age which 
had bidden a long farewell both to the 
spirit and the form of democracy in civil 
administration, such a form of govern- 
ment in the Church could not hope to 
maintain itself. Under the influence of 
the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its 
decadence, the simple overseer or superin- 
tendent (s7tiaxo7tog) of a remote provincial 
congregation of believers gradually grew 



102 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

into a metropolitan dignitary, and culmi- 
nated in the wielder of a secular sover- 
eignty sitting in council with the most in- 
fluential monarchs of Europe. The epiph- 
any of an absolute monarch with a triple 
tiara on his head when contrasted with 
the simplicity and unworldliness of the 
primitive bishops wears such a strange 
look that it has been judged, especially in 
Protestant countries, with a more sweeping 
severity than it deserved. As a mere form 
of government, no man can give any good 
reason why the Church should not be gov- 
erned by a monarch as well as the State ; 
the bishop of Rome, as supreme head of 
the body of bishops all over Christendom, 
and guided by them as his habitual advis- 
ers, was at least as natural and as reason- 
able a guide for the direction of the con- 
science of Christendom in the Middle Ages 
as the Council of Protestants who at Dort, 
in the year 1618, condemned the greatest 
theologian and jurist of the day to pine 
in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Di- 
vines in Westminster who empowered the 



THE CHURCH. IO3 

supreme magistrate to suppress the right 
of free thought in the breasts of all persons 
who were not prepared to set their seal to 
the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvin- 
ism. Nay, so far from there being anything 
anti-Christian or anti-social in the Pope- 
dom as a form of Church government, we 
may safely say that in ages of general tur- 
moil, confusion, and violence, the admitted 
supremacy of the visible head of a church 
founded on principles of peace and concili- 
ation could not act otherwise than benefi- 
cially. But when the person in whom this 
moral supremacy was vested became the ac- 
knowledged head of a secular princedom, 
the case was altered. It was an unhappy 
day for the Christian Church, the most un- 
happy day perhaps in its whole eventful his- 
tory, when Pepin, the ambitious minister 
of the last of the Merovingian kings, in 
the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope 
Zachary a spiritual sanction for his usurpa- 
tion of his masters throne. From that mo- 
ment the Church was doomed to a blazing 
and brilliant, but a sure career of downfall. 



104 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had 
to be rewarded for his pious subservien- 
cy : he received the exarchate of Ravenna, 
and became a temporal prince. From that 
time forward the head of the Christian 
Church, who ought to have stood before 
the world as a model of all purity, truthful- 
ness, peacef ulness, and ethical nobility, was 
condemned to serve two masters, God and 
Mammon, unworldly morality and worldly 
power which was impossible. From this 
time forward there was not a single court 
intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any 
knot of conspirators, into whose counsels 
the supreme bishop of the gospel of peace 
might not be dragged, or, what is worse, 
into whose lawless and ungodly machina- 
tions he might not be officially thrusting 
himself, in order to preserve some acces- 
sory interest or gain some paltry advantage 
altogether unconnected with his spiritual 
function. If there is any one element, 
always of course excepting the element 
of gross sensuality and absolute villainy, 
which more than another is adverse to the 



THE CHURCH. IO5 

spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the 
element of court intrigue, political con- 
tention, and party feuds. In this region 
love, which is the life of the regenerate 
soul, cannot breathe ; truth is put under 
ban ; lies nourish ; conscience is smoth- 
ered ; and low expediency everywhere takes 
the place of lofty principle. So it fared 
not seldom with the Popes ; and much 
worse in the last degree; for wickedness, 
like everything that lives, must live by 
growing, and the seed of secular ambition 
which was sown in lies will grow to rob- 
bery, blossom in lust, and ripen into mur- 
der. This anywhere, but specially in Italy, 
where from the time of the patrician Scipio, 
who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the 
hot contenders for absolute power, in the 
eager pursuit of their object, have never 
shrunk from the free use of the assassin's 
dagger and the poisoner's bowl. In fact, 
if the love of mere animal pleasure makes 
a man a beast, it is the love of power 
that translates him into a fiend; and of 
this sort of human fiends Italian history 



106 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

presents as appalling a register as can be 
found anywhere in the annals of our race ; 
and at the top of this register stand some 
of the Popes, whose names are as prom- 
inent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome 
as those of Nero, Domitianus, and Helio- 
gabalus are in the story of the imperial 
decadence. When we cast a rapid glance 
— for it deserves nothing more — on the 
revolting record of the Roman Popes in 
the age immediately preceding the Ref- 
ormation, we hear the solemn voice of 
history repeating again the maxim above 
quoted — corruptio optimi pessima : when 
priests are bad, they are very bad ; when 
the salt of the gospel, which was meant 
to preserve the moral life of society from 
putrescence, has lost its savor, if not cast 
out, it is worse than useless — it becomes 
a poison. 

Before proceeding to the modern his- 
tory of the Church, we ought to emphasize 
in a special paragraph the fact that one 
unfortunate result of the incorporation of 
the Church with the State was that the 



THE CHURCH. 107 

Church was now in a position to request 
the State to lend its potent aid in estab- 
lishing the true doctrine of the gospel and 
suppressing all heresies. That the State 
had a right to do so no man doubted ; 
even in democratic Greece free-thinking 
philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Diog- 
enes, and Socrates, were banished or suf- 
fered death on charges of impiety; and 
though, no doubt, political elements, as in 
the case of the Arminians in Holland, 
worked along with the strictly religious 
feeling to set the brand of atheism on those 
men, there cannot be any doubt that where 
the State and the Church were so essen- 
tially one, persecutions for unauthorized 
religious observances were perfectly legiti- 
mate, as indeed the memorable case of the 
forcible suppression of the Dionysiac mys- 
teries, more than two hundred years be- 
fore the earliest of the Christian martyr- 
doms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But 
there was a double horror in the relig- 
ious persecution, after the establishment of 
Christianity, now inaugurated for the first 



: ;: 



: : :zs :::r:: : v teach : 

2 ::r.dn:: 5; diirr.e:- 

: 2nd 

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thz : : - 1 

places rich with historical lessons in Lon- 

. ir.d not a few sad ones ; ti- 
des: of all i afield I can . ice 
the stones :: this memorable si ere 
our nc 

jmbowelled and quartered I : _ ratify the 
mee of an imperic ith- 

out thinking of the sad fate of the young 
and be Anne Askc This . 

the g :er of a knight of good family in 

Lincolnshire, under some of those stimu- 
lants of thought whic. ing up the 

grant traditions of medieval pie:;- had 
been led to concei ve serious i^ubts with 
regard :: :he Scripture authority* for some 
of the most univt. .nes 

:: E the Roman Church. This pons scep- 
ticism raining :: the ears of certain leading 
prrs:"? in Church and State whc liter 
the example of the Nicean doctors, con- 
i it a sacred i ..:; in matters pertain- 
3 to relirion to tolerate no contradic- 
tion, first brought this ladv before the 
Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from 
limb on the rack, be : -Id not 



IIO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

say that she believed what she could not 
believe without denying her senses, and 
then dragged her to the blood-stained 
pavement of Smithfield, where she was 
girt with gunpowder bags and fenced with 
faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God 
of Christians were a second and enlarged 
edition of the old Moloch of Palestine. 
And what was her offence — beautiful, 
young, pure, and truthful woman, not more 
than twenty -five years of age — that she 
should be treated in this worse than can- 
nibalic style in the name of the gospel of 
Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., 
in that style of insolent masterdom which 
he showed so royally, and conceiting him- 
self, like a Scotch fool who came after him, 
to be a considerable theologian, assumed 
the right to put the stamp of absolute king- 
ship on the doctrine of the Church that a 
piece of bread, over which a priestly bene- 
diction had been pronounced by a priest, 
was by the mystical virtue of this bene- 
diction changed into flesh, while the fair 
young lady persisted in seeing nothing but 



THE CHURCH. Ill 

bread. Let it be granted that the lady 
was in the wrong and the churchly tradi- 
tion right, it never could be right to tear 
her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones 
to ashes because she held an opinion which, 
to say the least of it, looked as like the 
truth as its opposite. How sad, how sor- 
rowfully sad, and what a commentary on 
what we are ever and anon tempted to call 
poor, pitiful, prideful, and presumptuous 
human nature, that Christianity had at that 
time been more than fifteen hundred years 
in the world, sitting in high places, and 
walking with triumphal banners over the 
earth, and yet neither the princes of the 
earth nor the rulers of the Church should 
have retained even a slight echo of that 
reproof from a mild Master to a zealous 
disciple, to the effect that no man who 
knew the spirit of the divine religion which 
He taught would ever propose to bring 
fire down from heaven or up from hell to 
consume the unbeliever. 

Such enormities in the doctrine and 
practice of the Church, as we have indi- 



112 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH t 

cated rather than described, could lead to 
only one of two issues — Reform or Revo- 
lution. The change brought about, though 
contenting itself with the milder name, was 
in fact the more drastic procedure. The 
European reformation of Martin Luther 
in 15 1 7 was a revolution in the Church, 
much more radical and much more worthy 
of so strong a designation than the political 
revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. It is 
needless to recapitulate the causes of of- 
fence ; they were only too patent — inso- 
lence, secularity, sensuality, venality, idle- 
ness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind 
in the Church ; but there were two causes 
which, in addition to corruption from 
within, tended to open the ears of Christen- 
dom largely to the cry for Church reform. 
These were the stir in the intellectual 
movement from the days of the author of 
the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced 
by the invention of printing in the middle 
of the fifteenth century, which was amply 
sufficient to become a danger to even a 
much less vulnerable creed than 'that which 



THE CHURCH. II3 

had satisfied the crude demands of medi- 
eval intelligence ; and, in the second place, 
the hostility which the insolence and am- 
bition of Churchmen had roused in the 
secular magistracy — that is, not only the 
monarch and his official ministers, but 
the great body of the higher nobility who 
found themselves ousted from their place 
in the familiar counsels of the monarch by 
the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign 
potentate. Thus the two best friends of 
every Established Church in its normal 
state were converted into enemies ; and 
the natural indignation of the common 
people at the licentious lives and gross 
venality of the clergy was stimulated into 
an explosion by the desire of the secular 
dignities to curb the pride of the clergy, 
and, it might likely happen also, to rob 
them of part of their overgrown wealth, 
nominally for the public good, really for 
the aggrandizement of the Crown and the 
nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope 
Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and abhor- 
rent practices of the Borgias, more fit for 



114 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

a sensational melodrama in the lowest 
Parisian theatre than for the home of a 
Christian bishop; the military rage of a 
Julius, who turned the Church of Christ 
into a travelling camp and the bishop's 
crozier into a soldier's sword ; the literary 
dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more 
eager to distinguish itself by the elegant 
trimming of Latin versicles than by apos- 
tolic zeal and Christian purity, — all this, 
so long as it disported itself on Italian 
ground, the aristocracy of England and 
Scotland might have continued to look on 
with indifference ; but that the son of any- 
body or nobody, in a county of unvalued 
clodhoppers, should jostle them in the 
antechamber of the monarch, and claim 
precedence in the hall of audience, simply 
because he was the supple instrument of 
an insolent Italian priest, this was not to 
be borne ; and so the Reformation came, 
with the mob of the lowest classes, the 
mass of the respectable middle classes, the 
most influential of the nobility, and the 
power of the Crown, all in full cry against 



THE CHURCH. 1 1 5 

the ecclesiastical fox. The revolution thus 
volcanically effected, and known in history 
under the name of Protestantism, meant 
simply the right of every individual mem- 
ber of the Christian Church to take the 
principles and the practice of his Church 
directly from the original records of the 
Church, without the intervention of any 
body of authorized interpreters ; and the 
necessary product of this right when exer- 
cised was first to declare certain practices 
and doctrines that had grown up in the 
Church through long centuries to be un- 
authorized departures from the original 
simplicity and purity of the gospel; and, 
further, to deny that there existed in the 
Christian Church, as originally constituted, 
any class or caste of men enjoying the 
exclusive privilege to perform sacred func- 
tions, and endowed with a divine virtue 
to perform sacramental miracles by their 
consecrating touch, — in a word, that there 
was no priesthood, properly so called, in 
the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is 
this doctrine, as some may think, the teach- 



Il6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

ing only of the Helvetic confession, what 
certain persons have been fond to call ex- 
treme Protestantism ; for, though the word 
priest has been retained in the English 
prayer-book as a minister in sacred things 
of a particular grade and exercising a 
particular function, the attempt made by 
Archbishop Laud and the Romanizing 
party in the Reformed Church of England 
to retain in the bosom of the Anglican 
Church the ideas which the ancient Jews 
and the Romish Christians attached to the 
word priest, proved a signal failure ; and 
for the sacerdotal despotism which it im- 
plied, as well as for the secular despotism 
which the priest advised and encouraged 
the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser 
and the advised justly lost their heads. Of 
all the teachings of Church history, from 
the Waldenses in the twelfth century down 
to the present hour, there is nothing more 
certain than this, that between Popery and 
Protestantism there is no middle term 
possible. They may agree, in fact they 
do agree, in many essential things, and in 



THE CHURCH. 1 1 7 

a few accidental ; but in the fundamental 
principle of Church administration they 
are diametrically opposed. The principle 
of the one is sacerdotal authority, absolute 
and unqualified ; the principle of the other 
is individual and congregational liberty. 
The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, 
the other either a free democracy or an 
aristocracy more or less penetrated by a 
democratic spirit, 

The practical outcome of this great Prot- 
estant movement, in the midst of which 
we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to 
appear in the highest degree satisfactory. 
Never was the life of the Christian Church 
at once more intensely earnest and more 
expansively distributive than at the present 
moment. On the one hand, the Roman 
Church, wisely taught by the experience 
of the past, though obstinately cleaving to 
that stout conservatism of doctrine and 
ritual inherent in the very bones of all 
sacerdotal religions, has been, in the 
main, studious to avoid those causes of 
offence from which the great rupture pro- 



Il8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

ceeded. On the other hand, the Protest- 
ant Churches, shaken free from the dis- 
tracting influence of sacerdotal assumption 
and secular ambition, have found them- 
selves in a condition to permeate all 
classes of society with a moral virtue, 
of whose regenerative action Plato and 
Socrates, in their best hours, could not 
have dreamed. Some people, while gladly 
admitting the immense amount of social 
good that is done by the various sections 
of the Protestant Church, never cease to 
sigh for a lost ecclesiastical unity, and to 
lament the unseemly strifes that arise 
among those that should be possessed by 
one spirit and strive together for a com- 
mon end. But the persons who speak 
thus are either sentimental weaklings, be- 
ing Protestants, or are Romanists and sac- 
erdotalists in their heart. Variety is the 
law of nature in the moral no less than in 
the physical world ; and the absorption of 
all sects into one results in a stagnation 
which will never be found amongst moral 
beings, unless when produced by weakness 



THE CHURCH. II9 

of vital force from within, or unnatural 
suppression from above. The two domi- 
nant types of church polity recognized in 
this country since the Reformation — 
the Episcopal and the Presbyterian — of 
which the one boasts a more aristocratic 
intellectual culture, and the other a more 
fervid and forcible popular action, may 
well be allowed to exist together on a mu- 
tual understanding of giving and taking 
whatever is best in each, and thus, in 
apostolic language, provoking one another 
to love and to good works. Competition 
is for the public benefit as much in 
churches as in trades. Dissent from any 
dominant body, even though it may 
proceed from the exaggerated importance 
given to a secondary matter, will always 
produce the good result that the dominant 
body will thereby be stirred to greater ac- 
tivity and greater watchfulness; so that, 
in this view, we may lay it down as one of 
the great lessons of history that the best 
form of church government is a strong 
establishment qualified by a strong dis- 



120 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

sent. As to the proposals which have in 
recent times been made for the formal 
separation of Church and State, they bear 
on their face more of a political than of a 
religious significance. Impartial history- 
offers no countenance to the notion that 
Established Churches, when well flanked 
by dissent, and in an age when the spirit- 
ual ruler has ceased to make the arm of 
the State the tool of intolerance, are con- 
trary either to piety or to policy ; and in 
the desire so loudly expressed at election 
contests to lay violent hands on the valu- 
able organism of church agency existing 
in this country, the venerated inheritance 
of many ages of patriotic struggle, the 
student of history, with a charitable allow- 
ance for the best motives in not a few, 
feels himself constrained to suspect in all 
such movements no small admixture of 
sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and 
domineering democracy. Christianity, of 
course, stands in no need of an Estab- 
lished Church; religion existed for three 
hundred years in the Church without any 



THE CHURCH. 121 

State connection, and may exist again ; but 
Christianity does, above all things, abhor 
the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and 
Church from motives of jealousy, envy, or 
greed ; and, along with the highest philos- 
ophy and the most far-sighted political wis- 
dom, must protest in the strongest terms 
against the abolishing of a useful ethical 
institution to gratify the insane lust of 
levelling in a mere numerical majority. 

The Church of the future, whether es- 
tablished or disestablished, or, as I think 
best, both together, provoking one another 
to love and to good works, has a great 
mission before it, if it keep sharply in 
view the two lessons which the teaching of 
eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces. 
Our evangelists must remove from the 
van of their evangelic force all that sharp 
fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholas- 
tic dogma, which, being ostentatiously pa- 
raded in creeds and catechisms, has given 
more just offence to those without than 
edification to those within the Church ; 
the gospel must be presented to the world 



122 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

with all that catholic breadth, kindly hu- 
manity, and popular directness which were 
its boast before it was laced and screwed 
into artificial shapes by the decrees of intol- 
erant councils, and the subtleties of ingen- 
ious schoolmen. And, again, they must 
not allow the gospel to be handled, what 
is too often the case, as a mere message 
of hope and comfort in view of a future 
world; but they must make it walk di- 
rectly into the complex relations of mod- 
ern society, and think that it has done noth- 
ing till the ideal of sentiment and conduct 
which it preached on Sunday has been 
more or less practised on Monday. In 
fact, there ought to be less vague preach 
ing on Sunday, and more specific and di 
rect application through the week of gospe 
principle in various spheres of the intel 
lectual and moral life of the community 
If, in addition to this, our prophets of the 
pulpit take care to keep abreast of the in- 
tellectual movement of the age, so as not 
only to stir the world in sermons, but to 
guide them in the wisdom of daily life, 



THE CHURCH. I 23 

they have nothing to fear from all the 
windy artillery that the speculations of a 
soulless physical science, the imaginations 
of a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of 
a cold philosophical formalism, can bring 
to bear upon them. Let them grapple 
bravely with all social problems, and prove 
whether Christianity, which has done so 
much to purify the motives of individuals, 
may not be able also to put a more effec- 
tive steam into the machinery of society. 
If they shall fail here, they will fail glori- 
ously, having done their best. It is not 
given to any people, however great, to 
solve all problems. When Great Brit- 
ain shall have played out her part, there 
will be scope enough in the process of 
the ages for another stout social worker 
to place the cornice on the edifice of 
which she was privileged to raise the pil- 
lars. 



.Virtit ■;' ■ ; 






